Zunyi: bats in the karst

July 21, 2021

IN ZUNYI, some 150 kilometres from the site of a famous 1935 meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, authorities recently demolished a restaurant built in the mouth of a long limestone cave system they said had violated protection rules and inflicted irreversible damage on a bat habitat.

The court ruling to remove the construction and restore the cave was a rare victory for conservation and a sign that China was recalibrating its relationship with nature, and its treatment of natural habitats, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But next to the cave is a concrete factory using limestone collected from the slopes of the mountain, and on the other end of the cave system is a working coal mine, the ceramic statue of a giant Buddha and a small temple built into the karst. 

In Guizhou and elsewhere, for every site that is saved - for every ecosystem and natural habitat protected by China’s “red line” scheme -  there are dozens that have already been destroyed, or are still earmarked for development. 

AFTER faffing about for far too long at the taxi stand at Zunyi’s dinky little airport, we grab a cab and head for the city, wary always that we are being followed. In another cloak-and-dagger operation, we change vehicles in the underground carpark of a hotel and then head off to our destination, a bat cave in the city’s northwestern rural settlements where two local officials were punished recently for trying to build a restaurant.

This minor planning permission breach in a remote, impoverished rural backwater is perhaps one of the few occasions in which the needs of conservation and habitat protection were placed higher on the list of priorities than economic development. 

The roads are immaculate. I ask myself: is it still possible to describe any location as “remote” if it is connected to the big cities by thousands and thousands of miles of pristine highway? The adjective “remote” is in any case an example of journalese, and is designed to indicate how much hard work we have done to get here. 

Billboards advertising various kinds of local liquor rise out of the hills and line each side of the highway. Our driver told us that the famous local maotai brand is the drink you give to people you don’t know: the local home-brewed stuff tastes far better and is saved for friends.

Every province, every city, every county in this vast country will deliver glib clichés about some world-beating local feature, foodstuff or product. 

The hill forests are riddled with wild boar. They appear ahead of the harvest and have their fill in the cornfields. In the old days, the farmers would immobilise them with cattle prods, take them home and butcher them, but now they aren’t allowed. 

I look out of the window and stare at the settlements buried in the curls and folds of the hills, stacked on the complex karst landscape, nestling between the farms and the forests. We pass a cluster of wind turbines, rotating gently on Guizhou’s distinctive fat  green hillocks.  We pass Maotai’s airport - which is overlooked by a giant ceramic bottle of the Maotai liquor, me feeling like a giant white sore thumb about to enter a remote southwestern Chinese village. 

After another two hours or so driving through the angular and irregular karst landscape, we finally find a narrow paved road that threads through the deep valleys on the edge of the highway and takes us to our destination, which at the moment, is little more than a cave entrance reinforced in some parts by concrete. The concrete was clumsily put in place to help repair the damage done, but all the rest of the construction work has disappeared, and the carpark outside has been torn up and replaced by a small copse.

I spoke to a few old timers living nearby about the motives behind the demolition and they didn’t really have much of an idea about conservation or preserving the landscape. They assumed that it was a business dispute and said it was a matter for the local government. 

And nearby, there didn’t seem to be much heed paid to protecting the landscape. Above us was a bridge for a high-speed road, its stanchions planted in the slopes of the valley. On another side road beside the cave was a concrete factory, which used limestone from the surface of the adjacent hills to make clinker. 

A passing resident in a car stops and gets out and points to where the restaurant had been built. He shrugs when I ask him why it was demolished and says, “You know, the government, officials are all corrupt aren’t they?”    

He tells us there’s another entrance on the other side of the formation, and we drive on, looking for it. After an hour or so, we finally find it. On the way in is a small but active coal mine, overlooked by a large ceramic statue of Buddha in a shrine built on the edge of this cave formation. For every protected space, I note, there are still dozens of encroachments, and here, living in this small and implausible temple, is a cackling old lady, in charge of keeping the place ticking over, sweeping the floors, repairing broken barrels, collecting alms from passing pilgrims. 

“I don’t know why they demolished the restaurant,” she says. “If they want to build it they should build it.” 

She shows us several entrances into the cave system, and we have to crouch to get inside. It is too early for the bats right now, but she tells us she’s been living in close proximity with them for a decade.

This is why it is so important to reassess the concept of “remote”. I don’t know whether the bats in this particular cave could carry a potentially lethal disease: I only know that it would be relatively easy for me, a city dweller with an unprimed immune system, to get here, get infected and take the disease back with me to Shanghai.  

As I head back to the airport, the rain begins to fall and a faint rainbow forms over the karst. Entering a tunnel, a huge flat slab of water slams against the windscreen and it feels for a moment as if we have plummeted into an ocean. Visibility is quickly restored, and another vehicle appears before us: I wasn’t sure how close were were to a collision, but I felt spooked. This is the extreme weather we expect during China’s summers, though this year it appears to be more extreme than usual.