Transparency, Yunnan-style
March 9, 2008
COVERING CHINA’S National People’s Congress this week, your correspondent was assailed by countless Chinese journalists anxious to get us to confirm how open and transparent the media environment had become in the run-up to the Olympic Games. I don't dare to visit baidu.com to confirm how many times I have appeared in various regional newspapers and websites saying that, yes, indeed, things are far better than they were in 2006, the last time I covered this particular event, and that yes, I have visited their particular city and found it very enlightening and enjoyable, thank you very much.
During Wen Jiabao's uninspiring opening speech, we welcomed the distractions offered by the reporter from the Xinjiang Business Times, the Ningxia Morning Post or the Xuzhou Herald, and spent a good deal of time explaining to them what we were doing, and how excited we were about China's policymaking challenges. After a while, of course, cordoned off by the organizers and surrounded by sweating deadline-wary hacks anxious to be let loose on the delegates, I began to tire of all the attention, and told at least one local journalist that the only reason I was here was because my boss forced me to come - on pain of dismissal - and that things were much better when the proceedings were held behind closed doors, because at least in that case we wouldn't be expected to report on them. But on Friday, we received an unexpected phone call.
On its website, the National People's Congress has set up a facility whereby foreign journalists could submit interview applications to every single delegate. Most foreign journalists - include myself - thought that this was utterly bogus, and even suspected that the applications would just vanish into the ether as soon as the submit button was pressed. Nevertheless, we submitted anyway.
I sent one form to interview the Communist Party boss of southwest China's Yunnan Province, Bai Enpei, slightly emboldened by the fact that the Yunnan government appears to be in the middle of an idiosyncratic open government experiment, in which local newspapers and websites have released the phone numbers of every NPC delegate as well as a number of department spokespeople.
Surprisingly, the next evening, a representative of the Yunnan delegation called and said that although Bai would not have time to accept a formal interview, he would answer my questions if I chose to attend their provincial delegation meeting on Friday afternoon. So, I thought - the mechanism does indeed work, and things are genuinely more transparent than they used to be.
My questions didn't seem particularly controversial, and mainly involved the plans to develop the hydropower resources of Yunnan province, but something had obviously irked Secretary Bai Enpei. I managed to persuade my employers that this was, indeed, something of significance, and headed off to the hotel where the delegation was holding their meeting.
After several hours of boilerplate from the representatives of business and government from the Yunnan delegation, after several empty hours trying to identify which ethnic head-dress belonged to which particular ethnic minority as the head of the Yunnan social security bureau rambles on about god knows what, and after a haplessly prearranged routine involving Central Chinese Television and a gift that they had arranged for Secretary Bai, I finally got my chance. I had submitted three questions and presumed that the one that had pricked their attention was either the one about the Tiger Leaping Gorge or the one about the Nu River, so I duly combined both questions into one, and asked if the Tiger Leaping Gorge hydropower plant had been cancelled, and if construction on the Nu River had already begun.
And so, some obscure NPC bureaucrat talked about the plans of the province and how they had not yet been put into operation yet because the province was too concerned about how much land was being submerged, and how many people were being displaced, and were now looking for new proposals, etc, and how, obviously, the Nu River project had not yet started construction because it hadn't yet been approved by the state authorities. So far, so predictable.
Suddenly, Secretary Bai began to talk, and it turned out that it was a question I had proposed, but didn't ask, that had drawn his attention. It was about the "central Yunnan water diversion project", and the role it was playing in the cleaning-up of the Dianchi Lake. He wanted it to be known that the project was not being used to flush pollution out of the Dianchi Lake, but on the contrary, was simply designed to bring precious drinking water supplies to Kunming. This flew in the face of something that Pan Yue, crusading vice-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said in a private meeting late last year. Why was Bai so unhappy?
Presumably it is because the water diversion project involves the Jinsha River, the upstream branch of the Yangtze, and therefore requires the approval of the central government to go ahead. The project also involves the Nu River, which flows through several hundred kilometres of spectacular gorges before exiting China through Burma. The project, for that reason, also requires the consent of several countries in southeast Asia.
So maybe I was playing a small role in the propaganda efforts of the Yunnan government, which were aimed at persuading the world that a major engineering project was aimed not at redressing the pollution problems that arose from the untrammelled growth of paper mills, cement factories and steel smelters on the eastern banks of the Dianchi Lake - and possibly from Bai Enpai's belief that in a poor region like Yunnan, economic growth always comes before environmental protection - but was actually designed to solve humanitarian problems and provide the people of Kunming with vital water supplies.
Yunnan is planning to spend almost RMB 50 billion on the project to divert 48.9 billion cubic metres of water to needy areas. It insists that it is not using it to clean the mess in the Dianchi Lake, formerly one of the major sources of drinking water in the region but now a sickening dark mess of fertilizers and pesticides flowing in from agricultural sites in the east, and industrial contaminants from power plants, steel smelters and cement makers in the west. But the only people represented at a recent meeting to discuss the plan were the Dianchi Lake polluters themselves.
The government has already spent 3.8 billion RMB trying to clean up Dianchi, but all to no avail.
The project in question is a typical Chinese Communist “swallow the cat to catch the bird” affair, in which the grave environmental consequences of one particular Promethean campaign against nature are supposedly redressed by launching yet another Promethean campaign against nature. Overambitious industrialization and irrigation programs in northern China, fore example, have left the Yellow River incapable of supporting the millions of people living near its banks, and for many years, water supplies were so denuded that the river was unable to reach its delta on the eastern coast.
And so, the state has decided to build three massive new canals through some of the most challenging terrain in the country to divert water north from the Yangtze in the south. Meanwhile, massive land clearances near the Yangtze itself have left the region prone to floods, prompting the state to build the world’s biggest dam at the Three Gorges, which has in turn created severe siltation threats that will, in turn, be redressed by the construction of still more hydropower facilities further upstream.
