Watts’ journey takes us to nature reserves where the animals are served up in official banquets, to the tragic province of Henan, once held up as an exemplar of Maoist development, now stricken by poverty, soil exhaustion, corruption and an AIDS epidemic traceable to an official blood-selling scheme. Then there is Linfen, a coal town in Shanxi Province, said to be the most polluted place in the world, where birth defects run at six times the national average which, in turn, is three to five times the global norm; and where the miners’ death rate per tonne of coal is 30 times that of the US.
The Yellow River is all but destroyed. The government has encouraged people to move west from the overpopulated heartland into the arid and mountainous lands of the Uighurs and the Tibetans, places able to support sparse populations but where ecosystems rapidly collapse under the weight of numbers.
If this is a bleak story, it is because the prospects are bleak. Watts tries to balance this journey through dystopia with signs of hope, but we sense he would wish to be more convinced than the evidence allows. This book is not simply an indictment of China’s development path: it is a lesson for us all in the dangers of how we live. Will we heed the lesson and will China’s bid for sustainability prove more than a rebranding exercise? Any reader of When a Billion Chinese Jump must hope so.
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