Ankle-deep sand blocked the door of their new home. Pushing bicycles through the yard was like wading in a bog. The “lake” part of Miaomiao Lake Village turned out to be nothing but a tiny oasis more than a kilometer from the cookie-cutter rows of small concrete-block houses.
Ma Shiliang (馬世良), a village doctor whose family was among about 7,000 Hui Muslims whom the Chinese government had brought to this place from their water-scarce lands in the nation’s northwest, said officials promised “we would get rich.”
Instead, these people who once herded sheep and goats over expansive hills now feel like penned-in animals, listless and uncertain of their future.
Illustration: Tania Chou
“If we had known what it was like, we wouldn’t have moved here,” said Ma, 41, who, three years on, has been unable to get a job practicing medicine in Maiomaio Lake Village or to find other reliable work.
China calls them “ecological migrants” — 329,000 people whom the government had relocated from lands distressed by climate change, industrialization, poor policies and human activity to 161 hastily built villages.
They were the fifth wave in an environmental and poverty alleviation program that has resettled 1.14 million residents of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a territory of dunes, mosques and camels along the ancient Silk Road.
Han Jinlong (韓金龍), the deputy director of migration under Ningxia’s Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, said that although the earlier waves were not explicitly labeled ecological migrants, they had also been moved because of the growing harshness of the desert. It is the world’s largest environmental migration project.
What China is doing in Ningxia and a few other provinces hit hard by drought and other disasters, both natural and of human origin, is a harbinger of actions that governments around the globe, including the US, could take as they grapple with climate change, which is expected to displace millions of people in the coming decades.
China has been battered by relentless degradation of the land and worsening weather patterns, including the northern drought, but mass resettlement has brought its own profound problems, embodied in the struggles of the Ma family and their neighbors.
Ma told me over tea in his living room that each household had to pay a US$2,100 “resettlement fee” and was promised a plot of land to farm as the families left behind plentiful fields and animals, but those who received plots ended up having to lease them to an agriculture company and were left with tiny front yards, where the Ma family grows a few chili plants.
The 11-member family was expected to squeeze into a 54m2, two-bedroom home — like many of the migrants, Ma erected an extra room with white plastic siding in the yard for his parents.
The officials who designed the new homes put toilets in the same room as showers, an affront to the Hui Muslims. Ma dug a pit toilet outside, where the front yard meets the road.
Ma has not only been unable to get officials to appoint him as a village doctor, but since November last year has also failed to find construction work — unstable and low-paying, but the most common job for the village men.
The family must live mainly off the US$12 per day his wife, Wang Mei (王梅), earns in an industrial farm field.
Three of Ma’s brothers and a nephew brought a total of 38 family members as part of the resettlement, but another brother, Ma Shixiong (馬世雄), was one of a handful who stayed behind in Yejiahe, a five-hour drive south, defying the government’s orders.
Officials tore down the homes of the families who left — and punished those who remained by refusing to renovate their houses or build them animal pens, and denying them water pipelines and subsidies for sheep and cattle.
Wang Lin (王林), who is also unemployed and was one of eight men I spoke to one afternoon following prayers at Miaomiao Lake’s Jian Mosque, said he and eight family members planned to return to Yejiahe next year if he does not find a job.
“No one has moved back yet, but people are talking about it,” Wang Lin, 48, said. “We can farm the land there. Our homes are no longer there, but we can dig into the earth and build a cave home.”
As in much of northern China, most of Ningxia’s 67,000 square kilometers are desert, including the areas chosen for resettlement. Government officials say places like Miaomiao Lake are still an improvement over Xihaigu — the vast region of southern and central Ningxia where the Mas and the other migrants came from — because they are closer to highways; to Yinchuan, Ningxia’s capital; and to the Yellow River, a major water source that helped give birth to Chinese civilization.
When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) visited Ningxia in February, he told villagers that “relocating impoverished people from bad natural conditions is an important way to alleviate poverty,” according to the Web site of the Chinese State Council.
A third of Ningxia’s population — and most of the people who have been resettled — are Hui Muslim. Some Western academics say that Chinese resettlement policies are at least partly aimed at controlling ethnic minority populations and that officials may cite environmental reasons as a cover.
Though remote, the parched Xihaigu area has been on the radar of the central government since at least the 1980s, when officials began producing a series of grim reports on the viability of the land. A recent estimate by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources said the region could sustain only 1.3 million people; the population in 2014 was about 2.3 million.
“The government decided to move people out because the land couldn’t feed them,” Zhang Jizhong (張吉忠), deputy director of the Ningxia Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, told me when I met with him and his colleague Han in their Yinchuan office in August. “The factors are rooted in history, nature and society.”
When the resettlement program was begun in 1983, migrants were given land in the north and told to move and build new homes on their own. These days, the government builds them homes, albeit small ones — of the US$3 billion spent on the five waves of relocation, Zhang said, half was used on the most recent.
“Houses need to be built well, roads need to be built well, schools need to be built well,” Zhang said. “It is all the responsibility of the government.”
The relocation process begins with the government asking geological experts to look for sufficient arable land elsewhere in Ningxia, Zhang said, then gauging whether enough water can be transferred to those places.
The size of each family’s yard is about 150m2, with the house taking up a third of that. Many complain about the cramped quarters and the additional one mu of farmland — a 15th of a hectare — that each person is allotted in most cases, far less than they had in their home villages.
“Land and water are indeed becoming more scarce in the north,” Zhang said.
In the last wave of relocations, a quarter of the families did not get any land, he said, adding that the government had labeled them “labor migrants” and was negotiating with companies to give them city jobs, including as cleaners and security guards, but officials know that even those who get farmland face a struggle.
“That is far from enough to get you out of poverty,” Zhang said. “It can maybe feed you. The government has been making lots of efforts to get people to be able to work in other sectors, so you don’t rely on land itself for a living.”
The largest of Ningxia’s new migrant villages, Binhe Homeland, has more than 16,000 residents. The smallest have just a few hundred each. Miaomiao Lake is in the middle, with 7,000.
The 1,400 homes there look bland and anonymous, separated by low concrete walls, with only numbers to distinguish them — Ma’s is House 35 in District 5.
Most villages have an elementary school, a market area and mosques, but seem more like refugee camps than organic communities.
One afternoon during one of my three visits to the region, Wang Mei came home from the farm to nap during her lunch break. She had been up since dawn spreading fertilizer over a field of watermelons.
After a half-hour’s sleep, it was time to return to the desert sun.
She said goodbye to Ma and their younger children, clad in red-and-white school uniforms. Then she drove an electric cart to a highway, where dozens of other women in electric carts were gathering. Most wore pink headscarves, a shock of color against the sand that stretched to the horizon.
The women clambered onto the flatbeds of two John Deere tractors, which drove off to the watermelon field.
“The work is so exhausting and I’m dead tired,” Wang Mei, 39, said. “I never worked like this before, when we were living in the south. I farmed our own land there and we lived our days according to our own schedule.”
Before the move, Wang Mei imagined that the family would grow food on its own patch of farmland, to eat and sell, as it had done in Yejiahe, but officials decided that the villagers would be better off leasing the plots — a total of 1,335 hectares — to a large company, Huatainong Agriculture, and other enterprises because the desert land was hard to farm.
“New immigrants don’t really know how to plant crops on the land,” said Wang Zhigang (王志剛), the director of the Pingluo County Poverty Alleviation Office, adding that migrant families had tried and failed.
Each family member is supposed to receive 195 yuan (US$29) per year for leasing their land.
Wang Zhigang said the money is deposited annually in a family bank account, but Ma said his household had not received the payment after the first year.
So the family’s only steady income is the US$12 a day Wang Mei is paid by Huatainong — less than the US$15 per day that China says is the average for migrant workers.
Like many in Miaomiao Lake, Ma has taken out government loans to help meet the family’s living expenses.
Ma learned how to give shots years ago, after watching an older brother whose son got sick frequently. When the village of Yejiahe needed a doctor, that gave him a leg up. His formal education had stopped before high school, but he studied medical techniques on his own.
He received his medical license in 2011. He mostly administered vaccines, and treated colds and other minor illnesses, but Ma said he could not get a job as a doctor in Miaomiao Lake because the government had created only one such post there, which he considered absurd for a village of 7,000.
He said that he had repeatedly asked the county health department to add a position for him, but that an official had told him the decision could be made only at a higher level. (A county health official said in an interview that there were plans to add two doctors to Miaomiao Lake.)
Still, friends sometimes ask Ma to administer a shot. In return, he sometimes asks for the equivalent of US$1.50.
One afternoon, a fellow worshiper from Jian Mosque came to Ma’s home for an intravenous drip of calcium gluconate, a mineral supplement. The man lay on a bed by the front window and held out his right arm. The doctor worked with precision — and without charge.
It is difficult to get a handle on employment in Miaomiao Lake. Wang Zhigang said of the 2,000 ecological migrants in the village who had “the ability to work,” 93 percent had jobs.
A senior executive at Huatainong said the company employed 400 to 500 women for half the year and about 100 at other times.
Ma and many others disputed the official employment figures, saying that most men could not find regular work on construction projects in the new villages or nearby cities.
Once each year, residents said, government officials have offered training sessions of one to two hours to teach villagers how to become welders or bricklayers.
“Useless,” Ma said. “There aren’t many jobs available.”
City-level officials visited the village for a day in May; Ma said one offered him a job in a coal-washing factory in a city, but he “didn’t want to go because the lifestyle there is different than ours,” with few Hui Muslims and many ethnic Han.
There was also the matter of pride.
“I’ve been a village doctor,” he said. “You can’t just make me a coal-mine worker now. It’s not appropriate.”
Unable or unwilling to do manual or farm work, some of the migrants run restaurants, pharmacies or other small businesses. Near the front archway of the village is a plaza lined with storefronts, but most were shuttered the morning I visited. No one was renting them.
I found Ma Nuwa in the only open shop along one row. She had been selling blankets there for more than two years and said she made about US$75 per month.
“Business is bad; there are no people here,” she said. “I have three boys. My husband has to go outside to find manual labor.”
Some out-of-work men retreat to the mosques, where five daily prayers give life some structure. Sometimes before going to pray, Ma Shiliang showers, puts on a crisp white shirt and fixes his skullcap just right, adjusting it in the mirror.
At his home, there are always children around. The parents took the youngest daughter, Shuyun, out of preschool because they could not afford the US$150 fee each semester. The oldest, 16-year-old Xiaofang, had been enrolled in a boarding school, but stopped after a year and a half.
“I don’t like school and I don’t want to go back,” she told me one day as she cooked noodles for the family for lunch. “I plan to go to Yinchuan after Ramadan to find work.”
However, Ma Shiliang said: “My oldest daughter isn’t going to Yinchuan. She’s too young.”
The road to the Ma family’s old village, Yejiahe, winds uphill past a reservoir, past hills covered with soft yellow silt, past horses and haystacks in people’s yards. The landscape is wide and rolling and green, nothing like Miaomiao Lake.
We parked at the top of a ridge overlooking a valley. Ma Shiliang’s brother, Ma Shixiong, greeted me at the side of the road, dressed in a blue tunic and skullcap. His face had as many creases as the hills.
He was the man who stayed behind, even as his extended clan, including his elderly parents, had migrated north. His wife, three of his sons and four grandchildren, also remained in Yejiahe — two other sons work at a restaurant in Beijing. About 300 villagers remained from a population of about 1,400 in the late 1990s.
Why some chose to stay, even at the cost of fracturing extended families, became clear once Ma Shixiong walked me through his home.
Compared with his brother’s place in Miaomiao Lake, it might as well have been an imperial palace. Two rows of rooms face a large courtyard. The families of two of his sons, each with two children, have their own quarters. The total area is 300m2, twice the size of the housing plots in the new village.
Ma Shixiong said he had visited his family half a dozen times in Miaomiao Lake, before their ailing father died in February last year.
“When I first saw that place — that little yard and the little house and the little bathroom in front of the door...” he said, trailing off. “The hygiene is not good. It’s not a very civil lifestyle.”
“You don’t have land and you need to go out to find jobs,” he added. “How can you make a living?”
As we talked, neighbors began crowding into the front room. They had heard that a reporter from Beijing was in town. Each wanted to voice a complaint about local corruption.
“It’s a primitive society here because no one cares about us,” Ma Shixiong said.
For Ma Shixiong, the memory of his four brothers’ departure in November 2013 was as clear as the sky overhead. The families had loaded their furniture onto trucks. They had boarded a bus the next morning.
“We all cried,” Ma Shixiong said. “They cried, I cried. We were a family and now we’re separated. I hope they will move back, but it’s impossible.”
We walked back down the ridge. The afternoon shadows were lengthening and the homes on the hill stood silent in their ruin.
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