Environmental Migration - A Wolf in Green Robes

Sounding a small but pleasing note amid the broader cacophony of impending environmental cataclysm, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency filed a cautiously optimistic report this week on the success of a project aimed at revitalising the retreating grasslands at the headwaters of the country’s largest rivers.

Satellite surveys apparently show a quicker than expected recovery of the fragile environment of the Sanjiangyuan region, home to the sources of the Langcang (Mekong), Yangtze, and Yellow rivers.

It’s a welcome piece of news at a time when the ecological balance of the Himalayan region as a whole looks to be creaking towards a tipping point, with serious implications for China’s already shaky water security situation. Since its inception in 2005, the Sanjiangyuan project has been a major set-piece in the Chinese government’s attempts to tackle the issue of massive environmental degradation within its own borders.

But beyond its talk of ‘scientific’ methodology, enclosure and re-seeding strategies, it is clear that the main thrust of the government’s approach here has been devastatingly simple: remove people from the equation.

Paying the price of this ‘green’ success story are some 60,000 or more Tibetan herdspeople, who have been arbitrarily plucked from their nomadic surroundings and deposited abruptly in towns and cities outside the area, ostensibly to counteract the effects over-grazing. Shoddily built communities, lack of employment opportunities and a string of broken government commitments have all but snuffed out the optimism felt by many Tibetans at what they saw as a chance for a better life.

From the Siberian wildernesses of the north-east, across the Mongolian steppes, and into the high-altitude plains of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, a similar pattern is repeating itself: China’s minority nomadic communities are being systematically and often forcefully integrated into a fixed mode of urban existence as part of a process known as ‘ecological migration.’

The term itself is deceptive. Internationally, ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ migrants have increasingly become the focus of concern as the effects of climate change threaten to, displace millions if not hundreds of millions of vulnerable people worldwide. But in China, ‘ecological migration’ is not a phenomenon; it is a policy.

Adopted nationwide in 2002, its stated aim is “the re-location of people from ecologically fragile regions or those with an important ecological role to other areas, with the aim of achieving regulated economic and social development of population, resources and the environment.”

Although media accounts of ‘ecological migration’ now tend to view the process through the lens of the state’s more recent rhetorical emphasis on environmental protection and green issues, the original wording highlights the Chinese government’s long-running obsession with ‘improving’ its non-Han minorities, which make up just under 10% of the population

To date, Chinese academic and political appraisals of completed relocation projects have focused less on their ecological impact, and more on the successes of the ‘townification’ (chengzhenhua) of the herdspeople involved. Though they certainly encompass environmental goals, there is little doubt that, at least where minorities are concerned, these are often little more than thinly-disguised attempts at a very old-fashioned kind of civilizing program. In many respects, this fixation on ‘progress’ is inherited directly from the European colonial project that Beijing still occasionally makes time to condemn.

However, not all targets of such programs are ethnic nomads. As a recent scheme to protect the dusty, drought-stricken county of Minqin, in the country’s western Gansu province has shown, thinking on ecological migration diverges sharply when the country’s majority Han population are concerned.

Back in the 50s, thousands of Han migrants flooded into the area as part of Mao’s plan to ‘open up the west.’ Converting thousands of acres of desert into productive farmland, they came to represent a triumph of the peasant revolutionary spirit, and were hailed as national heroes. But the success was fleeting; by the beginning of this century, the dunes were encroaching once more, the water table was falling several metres a year, and the area’s rivers had taken a permanent leave of absence.

In domestic Chinese politics, the efforts to save the Minqin oasis have become one of the more high-profile environmental sagas of recent years. At the personal behest of State Premier Wen Jiabao (a former party secretary of the province), teams of scientists were dispatched to the area to work out a strategy for restoring its environmental balance.

The results were stark – the county’s inhabitants were placing substantially more pressure on the land than it could bear. Unless unsustainable rates of water extraction were curbed, the entire oasis would be swallowed by desert in a matter of years. Researchers proposed a direct readjustment of the population to reflect the level of resources available, a process which would involve the resettlement of thousands of households to adjacent counties.

But the authorities have so far decided against resorting to their usual drag-and-drop approach in Minqin. The measures currently in place to bleed the county’s bloated population currently involve a range of incentivised options for voluntary re-location, with mandatory moves here a thusfar unused weapon of last resort. Last year, around 8,000 individuals shipped out on their own initiative, lured by the prospect of 10,000 yuan (£1,100) compensation packages.

From any standpoint, the environmental situation at Minqin is much more desperate than it ever was at Sanjiangyuan. Moreover, the scientific evidence linking its deteriorating environment to overpopulation is much more substantial (questions still hover over how much nomadic farming practices really contribute to grassland retreat, with some scientists suggesting that wetter and warmer temperature trends, and not absent Tibetans, are behind the area’s miraculous recovery). Why, then, have the locals not been given their marching orders on this occasion?

The simple fact is that the government cannot treat ‘townified’ Han citizens like the residents of Minqin as it does its Tibetan herders. If it did so, it would in all likelihood precipitate what is known in current Chinese bureaucratic parlance as a ‘mass incident’ (or as the uninitiated would term it, a riot). With the political legitimacy of high-profile figures attached to the project, this represents too great a risk.

Whether this approach resulted from conscious consideration of the ethnic dimension involved or just a realistic assessment of the situation is irrelevant. The fact remains that so long as it senses it can get away with it, China’s government will continue to treat its ethnic minorities like children.

A journalist in the popular Chinese Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper recently published a passionately-argued piece decrying the country’s ‘blind fixation’ with rapid urbanization. In it, he attacked the dominant political trend of viewing the countryside as no more than a set of problems in need of solutions, seeking instead to validate rural existence as a legitimate alternative to urban life. China’s leaders could do worse than apply this logic towards their ethnic minorities. If engaged on their own times instead of as ‘baby brothers’ to the Han, they might be less inclined to throw the kind of tantrum that left hundreds dead in the ethnic riots on the streets of Urumuqi this summer.