COP15 in Kunming: Elephants, toy towns and concrete mountains

October 16, 2021

I HEAD to Kunming for the first leg of the COP15 biodiversity talks, long postponed because of COVID. It quickly becomes clear that the meeting is being used not so much to drive through a new international treaty, but to show off about how well China is doing to protect its ecosystems. Intrepid journalism was not welcome.

We are kept in a “COVID bubble” and forced to sign a declaration not to go anywhere other than the hotel and other approved venues for the duration of the conference, but we are still permitted to gaze out from the bus at the little bits of city titivation - the banners, the flower displays - that have been put in place. We are also taken on various trips organised by city propagandists to show us how well they are doing to protect their water resources. 

We end up in a suburb in the northwest of Kunming, where a stream of water flows from the Changchong Mountain and feeds into the huge and troubled Dianchi lake. An official proudly declares that the river here used to be in the “black and stinky” category, with waste dumped directly into the water, but has now been fixed. 

We are then shuffled off into a museum on the edge of the Cui lake, built in a compound that housed some Communist Party-related triumph several decades ago, and urged to peer at Zhou Enlai's old sleeping quarters and a set of glass display cases containing clippings of Mao Zedong's speeches, made while Yunnan was being "liberated" in 1948.

Reporters were also bussed to the Dianchi wetlands, where the experts on show expressed pride in the efforts to transform the water from “rank” to “slightly less rank” during the preceding two decades. I asked about the illegal construction on the edge of the lake, but this was clearly no place to ask taxing questions, and a government minion intervened. 

At the conference itself, the proceedings open with a short celebratory film about China's migrating elephant herd, telling us that they are "mischievous and lovely and fearless of obstacles" .

"Homesick, they return to the south after wandering in the suburbs of Kunming for days," the voiceover says, before explaining how well the authorities did to protect them, and how the elephant population of Xishuangbanna had grown so substantially in the last forty years. Their long trek, the video concluded, was an act of "unprecedented performance art triggering people's discussion and awareness of building a shared future of all lives on earth."  

We are then treated to a lavish, rousing song and dance routine by local ethnic minority performers. Making the keynote speech, Han Zheng, the Chinese premier, repeats some platitudes about making biodiversity a key part of every decision made at every level of government and enterprise. China attaches great importance to biodiversity protection. China sticks to an ecology first path for green development, securing remarkable achievements -   

There are many challenges facing foreign reporters in China. One of the most onerous is trying to prevent oneself from becoming part of the story. As I frantically transcribe Han’s speech, a tall skinny kid pokes me in the shoulder: "Can I interview you to ask you what you think of Yunnan's efforts to protect the elephants?" No you can't.    

At the hotel, I negotiate my way through layer upon layer of security overkill supervised by low-level staff. Box ticking. Perfunctory compliance. One size fits all. Here are all those regulatory failures that the central government has been criticising over the last few years.  It is the pointlessness of it all that irks the most. Ordinary guests walk in and out, mixing with the ordinary folk outside. The "COVID bubble" is almost entirely fictional.   

On the second day, in the main conference hall, we wait patiently not for Xi Jinping, but a recording of him. His voice is enough to send a frisson of fear through the venue. As I stand up to take pictures, I am surrounded by a phalanx of security guards urging me to sit down. Even a facsimile of Xi is sacred. China is hellbent on running this U.N. sponsored negotiation process like an extension of the National People's Congress.

The speeches are dull and earnest. A superannuated Chinese professor says China's philosophical traditions are all about "harmony with nature". One strand of Chinese philosophy might have been, but it certainly had little impact on the country's history, which has been all about subduing nature, erecting thousands of dykes and dams to control every single river and cultivate every bit of marginal land.

On day three, China drives through the "Kunming Declaration", which calls for the "mainstreaming" of biodiversity in all elements of decisionmaking throughout government and society. and includes all the Chinese government buzzwords about being in harmony with nature and whatnot. China’s environment minister Huang brushes off criticism from the Japanese delegation about China's failure to consult properly about the contents of the document.

After the meeting ground to an end, I decided to do some of my own reporting, and headed out to Changyao Mountain on the southeastern edge of the Dianchi Lake, identified recently by environmental inspectors as a "concrete mountain that has lost all its ecological function”.  

We left the main highway running along the banks of the lake and took a narrow road curling up the slope of the mountain, passing through several housing estates and villa complexes, some of which have already been completed. 

I make my way to a viewing platform to take some more pictures. A huddle of blokes in suits then converged around me. For the next ten minutes or so, they kept body-blocking me and holding their hands up in front of my phone. They wouldn’t even let me look at a nearby billboard. 

The gang repeatedly refused to identify themselves and by grabbing my arms and trying to manoeuvre me away, seemed to be trying to provoke me. Legally I didn’t need anyone’s permission to be there, but we all know that in China, everything is illegal unless the state expressly says otherwise. And we all know that an official secret can be anything and everything. Presumably, even the views from this viewing platform were now verboten.    

Back on the main road, driving between the extensive building sites on the slopes of the mountain and the huge, shimmering Dianchi Lake, I get out again and take more snaps of the cranes and the scaffolds and the ugly apartment blocks. Tourism is the thing here: they have built a glossy amusement park ironically entitled "Dian Old Town”, but there is nothing old about the ferris wheel and the fastidiously manicured gardens.

And when it comes to the fancy flowerbeds and the deep-green lawns, it is perfectly clear that developers in China have not yet learned the difference between being pretty and being environmentally friendly. China is still at the unwilding stage of development. Despite all the lip service paid to the protection of ecosystems and habitats, nature is still just another thing that should be tamed, submitted to the Party will, sequestrated and instrumentalised and dolled up into a sort of glossy, kitschy toy town.            

On the way back, the taxi driver plays a message on his phone from the police. "Please drive carefully. Please explain to the foreign journalist that he was blocked from the site for his own safety. Please explain to him that it is a building site and is not open. Tell him that for epidemic prevention purposes, for his own safety, he is urged to return to the hotel." And so on and so on and so on. They knew precisely what I was doing and where I had been.