Yunnan: Pachyderms, pastures new and the perils of journalism

July 9, 2021

1.

AN ASSIGNMENT takes me to Xishuangbanna again. When one arrives in the prefecture’s capital of Jinghong, one soon sees the ceramic elephant statues lining the boulevards. Elephants are obviously a major part of the branding of Xishuangbanna, which even under onerous, punitive COVID restrictions, still aims to become a major tourism hotspot. And yet, their habitats have become fragmented, and have been steadily nibbled away at their edges even as their population has increased. This, so the speculation goes, is one reason why that famous herd is now marauding through northern Yunnan: more and more animals are chasing a dwindling amount of food.

Another reason? Their room to roam has been curtailed still further by the giant Jinghong dam and the hydropower plant, which means they can’t wade across the Mekong anymore. Giant superhighways have also broken their traditional migratory routes.  

We head straight to the Wild Elephant Valley. It stands on the road to Pu’er, a city renamed in honour of a local brand of tea whose plantations have done so much to erode elephant habitats. The curling Menghai highway is surrounded on both sides by thick forest, and we stop to take pictures of some eye-catching billboards propped against the trees, advertising multicoloured prefab holiday chalets that can apparently be assembled even in the forest canopy. 

I scribble down as much detail as I can, mentioning the white mist drifting through the mountain forest and the scattered settlements, old and new, built into the slopes along the highway.

At Wild Elephant Valley, the crowds are as heavy as the rain. The road leading into the site is lined on both sides with cars. Inside, after the mandatory health checks, I watch tourist after tourist clutching their umbrellas and feeding carrots and mangoes to one of the tame elephants stationed near the entrance of the park. Girls giggle nervously as the elephant’s trunk grabs fruit from their hands. 

A few yards uphill is the “elephant school”. Handlers in identikit jeans, wellies and umbrella hats mill about, while trained elephants carry excited children from one side of the field to another. A rattling tannoy broadcasts an excited commentary.  

We take a cable car to the other side of the park. Mist drifts in between and across the layers of mountain forest. I stare into the canopy, desperate to see just a glimpse of an elephant in the wild. Deep in the thickets, there are more than 300 of them, doubling in numbers in just two decades. It pleases me to look at the richness of the canopy, the bursts of flowers and the flurries of butterflies. It is also of great psychological comfort to listen to the white noise of birds, insects and rain.   

We climb out of the car and walk back. Along the way we interview one of the park's rangers about the elephants and how they are looked after. He’s a bit coy when it comes to the impact of the giant Jinghong Dam on the elephants’ trails and habitats, saying that’s none of his business, and that the state must have considered its impact on elephants when they were building it. 

Shortly after the ranger has shared his thoughts, an excited tourist skips past and tells us that a wild elephant has appeared under one of the footbridges running through the valley. We wander back, and spot this magnificant muddy beast foraging beneath the boardwalk. She grabs a bunch of reeds with her trunk and sweeps the ground in search of nourishment. She lingers, munching on grass. She then wades through a milk chocolate-coloured river, oblivious to the excitement of the passing humans.. 

My delight abates at the park museum, where there is a very large display of Prince William and his team of sycophants during a visit to the place a few years ago.     

We leave the park and drive around the surrounding area to look for any clear evidence to support the hypothesis that human encroachment has blocked the elephants’ natural migratory paths. Instead, we end up being stopped by a brusque traffic cop. He barked at us to put on our face masks and then let us pass.

The native grasses on which elephants feed have been replaced by cash-crop monocultures of rubber as well as tea. The question isn’t why fifteen elephants migrated north. The question is why there aren’t more of them looking for pastures new. This isn’t a China problem. This is a world problem.   

We head to the environs of the Jinghong hydropower plant,. A mile or so downstream, I gingerly descend to the riverside and chat briefly with the swimmers. Dams always attract swimmers: they slow the flow of water and also intercept the mud and silt.  

I watch an elderly man and woman digging a trench for a fresh pond on the banks of the Mekong to irrigate their tiny vegetable patch.  Like everywhere, the farmers are desperate to squeeze as much value as they can from whatever land they have.

Hanging on a rusty old gate is a sign forbidding people from passing through. I watch people pass through nevertheless. Despite the warnings about drowning, people exercise their communal right to go to the river to swim and bathe and scrub their clothes. Another sign warns people not to steal the electric equipment, or to lay explosives in the water to kill the fish, or to sail boats in the “forbidden zone”. The list of detailed proscriptions goes to prove that Chinese people are no more inclined to follow the rules than anyone else. It also serves to demonstrate the conflicts that arise when a growing population bumps up against the demands of industry and the needs of nature. 

2.

WE SET off for what I anticipate to be a wonderful day of reporting, and I feel exultant. We stop on the way to take pictures and mark the locations of the new road and railway bridges that connecting Jinghong with Mohan, one of our planned destinations on the border with Laos. We see new highways spanning the Mekong and new tunnels gouged out of the mountains. Forested hills have been cleared, their crumbling slopes held up by concrete latticework to prevent landslides.

Land use changes and habitat disruptions take place everywhere. I make note of a brand-new boarding school with dormitaries and playing fields, which is due to open in a couple of months. We also pass by the stanchions of yet another new railway bridge planted in the fields and forests near Xishuangbanna’s sprawling jackfruit plantations. 

As expected, we are ordered to get out of the car to “register” for our visit to the Botanical Gardens. Thinking little of it, I get out and expect a short lecture about wearing our masks and a few minutes of bureaucratic procedure. We approach a desk next to a small booth a few metres beyond the checkpoint. The policeman is polite, but after browsing my passport and presumably seeing the word “reporter” on my residence permit, tells us we aren’t allowed to drive any further. 

Even that doesn’t suffice. He is so scared that we will somehow breach the quarantine zone that he asks us to walk to the other side of the bridge and wait for our driver to make a U-turn and pick us up. I lose my temper and complain. Instead of putting me under arrest, the policeman instead assigns one of his underlings to sit in our car to make sure we head in the right direction back to the city.   

What we didn’t know at the start of the day was how much the new cases of COVID-19 in nearby Ruili had spooked the local government, with policemen on the ground leaving absolutely nothing to chance. During the last outbreak, the Communist Party boss of Ruili was fired. This time, the onus seems to be even heavier as they fight off what appears to be the highly infectious Delta strain brought into China from Myanmar. 

They clearly had some flexibility, some control over local policies, but decided to take absolutely no risk: in China’s top-down autocratic political structures, they can get away with inconveniencing the local public, and are completely indifferent (if not actively hostile) to the opinions of foreign journalists, but they will under no circumstances risk the ire of their Party superiors in Kunming or Beijing. 

We head to the new high-speed rail project near the airport and take a few shots. We then try some other potentially promising spots in the west of Xishuangbanna, figuring that they are so far away from the border that they would not be subject to any sort of travel ban. Along the way, as we head to the county of Menghai, I spot a road sign that instead of giving directions or urging us to slow down, says, “The People’s Army: built by People, For People”.

We didn’t anticipate how heavy-handed, how disproportionate the authorities would be. Another traffic cop directs us to the immigration booth on the roadside. A gruff, burly, bumptious border control officer explains to us (as if we didn’t know) that there was a “very serious” outbreak of COVID and that it was their duty to do everything they could to stop it spreading further.    

He said apart from Ruili, the travel restrictions extended to the cities of Lincang, Pu’er and most of Xishuangbanna, excluding only the urban centre of Jinghong. All this is a consequence of Yunnan’s long, unguarded and porous border with both Burma and Laos. It forces China to hitch up another interior border that is easier to control. 

I rarely dwell on how circumscribed we are here in China. If I want to put a fancy, philosophical gloss on my behaviour, I cite Václav Havel and say that in an authoritarian system, it is our duty to try to act as if we are free. More practically, I am bored by stories about the way foreign reporters are being prevented from telling stories. 

In any case, the language here is all about safety. The checkpoint officers solemnly intone that it is their duty to protect ordinary people (and us) from the risks of infection after the “very serious” new outbreak. These are further ominous signs that authorities are using neutral, apparently non-political public goods like health, hygiene and safety in order to strengthen controls, step up surveillance and further delimit our movements. 

And yet. In both our attempts to get out of Jinghong today, there was still a kind of semi-bureaucratic process. We would get out of the car to “register”, and the possibility that we would be allowed through would be dangled before us, only to be wrenched away as soon as they see the word “journalist”. If this were a blanket ban on foreigners, they would have turned me away immediately.  

On the road west to Menghai, they made us sit outside their hut, and said they would ask their superiors if there was a way in. I wasn’t going to raise my voice and complain this time. I thanked them profusely. Soon, a burly policeman returned and said, “We hope you understand. We cannot take the risk of letting you through. If anything happens to a foreigner, we’ll be held responsible.” 

The delay was actually a ruse to ensure that they could arrange a car to tail us for the rest of the day.  Meanwhile, our driver is increasingly compromised by all our interactions with the police authorities. He quietly takes calls. The police, who follow us all the way back to the city, are obviously using him to keep track of us, and we make a decision to switch drivers and cars as soon as it is convenient to do so.

There is still some reporting to do. We scale a hill just behind the Wanda resort and find a farmer’s little settlement. Zhou Hongbing is a friendly sort, and he chats at length about conditions here, about the impact of hotel construction, about how the elephants used to turn up here, decades ago, but no longer did so as a result of the Dam.

Wiry wild chickens sprint around the yard. His four dogs have the run of the place, and Zhou treats them like members of the family. At night, they warn him against poachers who used to shoot and steal his birds. Meanwhile, a woman turns up with a sack full of wild mushrooms foraged from the forest.  

A few yards away is the home of the Olive Tree animal sanctuary. As we approach, dozens of dogs fenced in a large paddock begin their chorus.  The lady who runs the place sighs and tells us how hard it is, how she works day after day and never gets a moment’s peace: but she clearly loves the dogs. 

She says they moved to this secluded spot four or five years ago because at their last home near the airport, all the neighbours were complaining about the barking. Now, it was the guests at the six-star hotel who were unhappy.

We make one last stop at a little patch of land underneath the stanchions of a brand-new highway. We climb a hill and note that the undercarriage of the road is infested with hairy black caterpillars, which my app tells me is of the species macrobrochis gigas. We are then invited by a resident to eat their delicious pineapples. They say the main impact of the road so far has been the noise.     

3.

ENGLAND beat Denmark 2-1 in extra time. I am pleased, though also sad somehow: I tweet that while football is coming home, I am stuck on the banks of the Mekong.  There is a corner of a foreign land that is forever England. 

At 7.30 we begin our early morning cloak and dagger operation: we meet the driver in the underground carpark to shake off a potential police tail, and make another attempt to get to the Botanical Gardens. I tell the driver we need to take the small country roads and avoid the checkpoints, and so, we head off into Xishuangbanna’s gorgeous countryside, which is occasionally marred by piles of excavated earth and the rumble of bulldozers and steamrollers. Along with the signs marking the environmental protection zones, there are spraypainted ads offering cranes to rent. 

We sail through the unmanned checkpoint, where half a dozen workers dressed in army fatigues lounge by the roadside. We travel through a small, picturesque village on the edge of the giant Rainforest Valley tourist resort, where residents gently potter about, tending to their allotments. On both sides of the road, there are rubber trees, all cinctured with the straps of the pots used to collect the oozing white fluids that are tapped from under the bark. 

We are, however, unable to get past the second checkpoint.  At a small table next to a police hut, we are barked at by an officious army staffer. There are signs warning not only of the risks of COVID-19, but also African Swine Fever. Beside us,  there are heavy thickets of rainforest stretching over the hills. A policeman repeats the usual mantra about the paramountcy of safety and the “very serious” outbreak in Ruili. 

The data suggests that these tough controls are working: only two new cases yesterday, after hitting fifteen a day earlier. 

We have no choice but to depart. Pleading with them is pointless. 

We stop off at a rubber plantation and talk to a tapper who has been working since the rain stopped in the early hours of the morning. Business isn’t particularly good right now: everywhere you go, the landscape has been transformed by the rubber boom, but now there’s just too much of it and prices have plummeted. Local farmers are already replacing their rubber trees with more lucrative fruit, she said. 

We then drive through Manfa Village, which has been identified in some of the scientific literature as a bat sampling site. I speak to a tour guide in ethnic costume but get nothing useful from her: she just wants to talk about tea. We head to the mountains and talk to a man responsible for collecting the rubber harvested by local farmers. Opposite is a cock fighting ring. Behind it, half a dozen muscular roosters strut about, showing off. 

We head to Jinuo Mountain, home of the Jinuo ethnic minority, which was only identified as such about 25 years ago. Though it has been transformed into an expensive and overengineered tourist resort, it is filled with natural forest and has also been identified in the scientific literature as a bat habitat. The place seems promising, and requires no breaching of COVID-19 rules. We wander around the outer edges of the resort, looking for people to talk to. A lady in a house on an adjacent hill tells us about the bats living in the Japanese banana trees, which sometimes flutter across the valley and land on her roof. Meanwhile, our driver calls and tells us that the local government is ordering us to leave. We ignore him. 

We then talk to a man called Ai sitting in a courtyard built at the foot of a dirt track near the main road, whose little community will also form part of the resort once it its second-phase expansion is complete. He tells us about the part that bats play in the local cuisine, and how they are cooked. 

At that point, two sinister and oleaginous government officials appear from nowhere, and as soon as they arrive, our reporting is effectively shut down. There is absolutely no question that we have broken any rules, but their emphasis is on our safety, the catch-all excuse used to prevent anyone from doing anything they disapprove of or cannot control. 

They say they want to confine us to the artificial toy-town tourist resort around the corner, where there are medical staff and facilities in case something happens to us. “We have to consider the safety of local people and your safety too,” said the man, an identikit low-level Party functionary. 

I said I understood but knew it was all a lot of hooey. They are simply terrified that we might see or do something that will get them into trouble. We drink our tea and leave. The functionaries stay behind, presumably in order to intimidate the poor tea man.

So far, the story goes like this: from the new plantations along the river, and the new schools, highrises and apartment blocks that form Jinghong’s inexorable urban sprawl, and all the way to the massive transportation infrastructure designed to turn Xishuangbanna into a southeast Asian “logistic hub”, land use changes are everywhere. The cranes poking across the river and the bulldozers ripping apart the landscape look no different to those in any other growing Chinese city: what’s different is the amount of biodiversity here, and the way construction and urbanisation and habitat destruction creates new routes for previously unknown viruses to enter the human lifestream. 

But there is another, drearier story, a story told so many times before, about a local government so terrified of its bosses in Beijing that it is forced to devote its security apparatus to stymie and intimidate a bumbling foreign hack.

Our last bit of reporting is a drive around Rongchuang, the real estate project once owned by the Wanda Group. New construction is everywhere. Apartment blocks are covered in bamboo scaffolding and green canvas. Cranes stand inertly overhead. A goon in a car follows us constantly, making not even the slightest attempt to conceal himself. It is exasperating, and we concede defeat.      

It turns out that the local government had decided to ban all foreigners from travelling to the Botanical Gardens and the rest of the border district of Mengla. The policy to exclude all foreigners is irrational. A foreigner who has not been able to leave China for the entire duration of this tedious pandemic is at no greater risk of spreading the delta variant than a Chinese citizen. What we are seeing is a one-size-fits-all policy that makes no real sense. This, of course, is also an old story.