Understanding China

A key to understanding China, it’s politics, it’s foreign policy and it’s long term plans, is to internalise the Hu line. This imaginary line runs from Heihe on the border with Russia in the North to Tengchong on the Myanmar border. For this reason it is also called the Heihe-Tengchong Line.

On the East of this line is most of what we consider “China”. In 43% of the land area you will find 94% of the entire population. When you see the elevation map above you can understand why. The eastern area is where you find the fertile lowlands, the wheat and rice fields and the intensive agriculture required to feed a massive population. It is the area densely populated by the Han Chinese people.

Across the line is the “Wild West”. It is a land of high mountains, badlands and punishing deserts. Only 6% of the population occupying 57% of the land area. It is a land of pastoralists rather than farmers, the cowboys of China’s wild west. Here you find the minority populations of Tibetans, Uigurs, Kazakhs and Kirgiz. They speak different languages, they worship their religions, they even look different to Han Chinese. These are the peoples of the ancient silk roads who bridged the gap between Imperial China and the Persian world since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome.

From the densely populated East they see a vast, underpopulated, under-exploited wasteland. They see the potential to convert this enormous area into a bread basket for the East. Beijing is pushing West using their new Silk Roads: the China Belt and Road Initiative. The intention is to include the wild west by making it an integral part of the overland routes to Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Turkic former Soviet Republics. Like the Israelis in the Negev the Chinese believe they can use engineering and technology to make their deserts flourish.

All along the desert fringes is their Great Green Wall of China, officially called the Three-North Shelterbelt Program. Its aim is to stop and even reverse the encroachment of the Gobi desert into former grasslands. Sadly much of the environmental damage was done by the Chinese themselves during the Cultural Revolution. Intellectuals were removed from their university posts, handed chainsaws and were sent to the frontier to do dangerous physical work under Mao Zedong. Ultimately the hope is to reverse the damage and even convert the recovered grasslands to horticultural production. This is very similar to what is happening across the Sahel in Africa and the tale of Yacouba Sawadogo.

Ningxia is being developed as China’s wine producing state. Gansu, the elongated province that was defined by the Silk Road, suffers from heavy metal pollution due to poor environmental practices in the past. As a result it is a centre of development for power, including wind, solar and more covertly, nuclear.

In the West we have heard many rumblings about how the Uigurs of Xinjiang province and the Tibetans of both Tibet and Qinghai are treated by the authorities. The Chinese view is that they are modernizing and improving life for the most uneducated, poorest and least developed populations in their country. But this involves forced education through the medium of Mandarin Chinese and the elimination of local cultural and religious nuances from the educational curriculum. This is a form of imposed colonialism all too familiar to indigenous populations under the thumb of a “Big Brother”. Here in Ireland the English used similar tactics in their attempt to wipe out Irish identity.

Han China has a great embedded distrust and even fear of the wild Western barbarians. In Europe we always imagine that the great threat to China was from the North, the Mongol hordes of the steppes. In fact Tibet was the greatest enemy of the early Chinese dynasties. Here is an ode to General Geshu, a great soldier of the 8th century Tang dynasty. He fought campaigns against the Tibetans in Qinghai, where he was a prince of the Turgesh people. Every year at harvest time the raiders would pillage the villages. General Geshu set up an ambush that trapped the bandits, wiping them out as a force for a generation.

哥舒歌

北斗七星高
哥舒夜帶刀
至今窺牧馬
不敢過臨洮

The song of Geshu Han (anonymous)

Beneath the starry plough he stands;
Shuge with his knife in hand.
Outside Tibetan raiders wait
fearing to pass Lintao gate.

-=o0o=-

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Cordons Pierreux

Just back from Lanzarote where farmers make use of Cordons Pierreux to improve the land.  It is interesting to note that there are three types of soil in Lanzarote, a yellow clay, a black cinder and a red gravel.  The red gravel is used for planting well established palms and succulents.  It seems to act as a barrier to weed growth.

The black volcanic ash cinder appears to be the favoured medium for farmers.

Lanzarote suffers from two key challenges, water and wind.  There is little of the first and an abundance of the second.  The dried out soil is easily blown away by the strong sea breezes that keep the islands cool.

Cordons Pierreux are stone ribbons that look like mini dry stone walls.  Farmers use them to mark out field areas, or in some cases to protect individual plants.  Some of them are very fancy, built tall and give good shelter to ornamental plants as in this photo.  These are designed to protect delicate seedlings from harsh sea winds.

For the most part the Cordons look like these field versions:

To illustrate how they work I took the following close up:

This cordon bounds a field end, and you can see the vegetation is far thicker on the left than it is on the right.  The prevailing wind blows from left to right.  Small grains of soil are blown up against the cordon and fill the cracks in the stones.  There they form a barrier to the soil moving.  This barrier also slows the loss of moisture from this field.  You can see (in real life) how the soil in the field is more moist that that outside the cordon.

Seeds blow into the cordon and germinate.  Their roots and shoots help bind the whole thing further.  They provide wells of biodiversity, home to native plants and a habitat for insects.

Cordons Pierreux don’t appear to be very sophisticated but in an environment such as this one they are a cheap, easy and incredibly effective solution to problems of farming.