A Pumi Village and its Controversial Roads - Part 1 of 2

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In today’s China, hundreds of thousands of small and struggling villages are facing a growing dilemma between development and preservation. In this two-part series, journalist Yongfeng Feng describes how one minority village has grappled with this challenge.

With a population of around 30,000, the Pumi are one of China’s smallest ethnic groups. Most members dwell in Lanping County of Nujiang Prefecture, in the country’s rugged western province of Yunnan. Yushichang, a smaller village under Lanping’s Jinghua administrative village, is almost exclusively Pumi. Local residents are especially proud of two traditions: protecting the area’s natural forests by resisting the encroachment of government-backed logging companies, and enshrining the Pumi culture through a firm belief that anyone who wants to learn the group’s language and traditions must make a pilgrimage to Yushichang.

But today, both the area’s pristine forests and traditional Pumi culture face a looming foe: road access. After years of resistance, many Yushichang residents are now eager to build new roads connecting the village to the outside world. This could open a Pandora’s Box, bringing disaster to the Pumi way of life. Like a bird that needs shelter from the forces of nature, Yushichang village relies on the surrounding forests to protect it from outside influences. Once the trees are felled, however, traditional culture—and the strong local respect for the natural world—could disperse rapidly.

Selling Trees to Build a Road

Zhouze Yang, the head of the Jinghua Administrative Village Committee, is a Yushichang native. Like other Pumis, the 44-year-old local has a deep reverence for the area’s forests. “We Pumis should always be living and dying with natural forests,” he says. He notes that Jinghua Village is one of the most heavily forested areas in Yunnan, and that Yushichang is the most forested area in Jinghua, with more than 90 percent original cover.

In 2004, forestry authorities relaxed logging policies in the region, allowing the cutting of Yunnan pine, a fast-growing, highly adaptable, and rapidly regenerating species. Loggers, however, must observe strict logging quotas and mark all trees to be felled, and timber processing is prohibited.

In 2004 and 2005, the village administration received annual logging quotas of 1,000 cubic meters. Log prices per cubic meter were 230 yuan (US$28) and 260 yuan (US$32), respectively. According to Yang, all the logs were felled and bought by a businessman from Sichuan Province. “We have made about 500,000 yuan (US$62,500) by selling our trees in these two years,” Yang explains. “Fortunately, through our efforts, we kept every penny of it within the village, preventing it from being usurped by the county government.”

The village used some of the timber earnings to pay off debts, buy household electric meters during the renovation of the power grid, and build offices for the village administration. Then, in June, local authorities spent the remaining 100,000 yuan to hire an excavator and to begin building a road from Jingkou Village, where the village committee is located, to Yushichang. The four-kilometer road stops halfway between the two villages, at the gap (called Yakou) that cuts off Yushichang from the outside world.

“The incomplete road was built on an existing path and it crosses only a few forests and farmlands, so it was easy to build,” Yang says. “But the remaining half will be tough.” He explains that the village will need financial support from the county government to fund the rest of the project, and must obtain permission from the local forestry authority to cut down any trees on the path.

Local reaction to the road has been mixed. Lanping County is also home to the world’s biggest zinc mine, and Jinding Zinc Industry Ltd. Co. is the most famous local enterprise in Nujiang Prefecture. Zhouming Yang, Zhouze Yang’s younger brother, is the head of the company’s first subsidiary factory and a strong supporter of the project. “When the road is done and opened for traffic, our village will be ready to get better off. Villagers who have acute disease can also be sent to the hospital quickly, without delays in transportation. ”

But Daoqun Yang, party secretary of the zinc company, is more skeptical. The highest-ranking Pumi official in Lanping, he left Yushichang in his teens and, as he explains, “devoted himself to the revolution.” According to Daoqun Yang, Yushichang was once a key stopover on the Tea-Horse Ancient Road, and all paths in the village were once paved with slate. During China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–60), however, the slate was dug up and used for aqueducts. “Now, the paths are in very bad condition,” Daoqun Yang observes. “It would have been better if we had used the money to repair the roads inside Yushichang first.”

No Roads, More Trees!

Since the 1970s, governments at various administrative levels have set up logging companies in Lanping County, relying on skilled lumberjacks from northeast China, where massive deforestation has occurred. The people of Yushichang still recall the days when they confronted these companies to protect their trees and stop the road building that was encroaching on their village.

“Senior people in the village were deeply concerned,” explains Jinhui Yang, the 46-year-old director of the local cultural center and former president of Yushichang Village. “They warned us that disasters would come if the trees were cut down. They wanted us to assume our responsibilities for protecting the trees.” According to Jinhui Yang, in order to prevent the forests from being cleared, dozens of villagers would rush to the village entrance, trying to stop the logging companies. “I, together with another villager, brought axes. When we could not stop them, we would chop their processed logs so they wouldn’t be able to sell them.” 

The protests caught the attention of the prefecture government, which pledged not to cut the forests surrounding Yushichang. Similar confrontations happened every time the logging companies tried to approach the village territory. There were also times when the logging companies were too strong to resist, and villagers were forced to give up portions of their forests in order to protect the remaining ones. 

Finally, in 1998, China’s central government issued policies on natural forest protection. The new regulations forced Nujiang Prefecture, located upstream of the Yangtze River in the ecologically sensitive Three Parallel Rivers Region, to cease all logging and to seek alternative development opportunities. Yushichang’s forests survived, though the stumps and logging roads remained.

New Perspectives

Over the past decade, local perspectives have changed, and more road projects have been proposed. A few years ago, Daoqun Yang, Zhouming Yang, and several other residents developed plans to build a primary school for Yushichang. The team wanted to use more-durable concrete and steel for the structure instead of traditional mud-wood or wood. To transport the materials from the outside, they would need to use the 20-year-old logging roads that zigzagged along the mountains, which provided partial access to the village. Connecting the roads with the village itself and the construction site, however, would require building another section of road. Though only about two or three kilometers long, the new section met with strong opposition. 

“I scolded Zhouming Yang at that time for considering this [project],” says Zhe Chen, a famous lyricist and founder of the Folk Vogue Project. Chen first came to Yushichang to help revive traditional Pumi culture. Since 2002, he has sought to cultivate the village as a base for his ‘Pumi Culture Live Transmission’ program.

To Chen, any touted benefits of the road—such as boosting market access for Yushichang’s agricultural products and livestock—would not be high enough to make it worthwhile, especially since the village’s products tended to sell at poor prices and in low quantities anyway. “On the other hand, it would obviously destroy the local culture,” he explains. Chen also raised concerns that a road to the village center would cut through the forest behind the village, which served a vital protective function; loss of the trees could lead to flooding and serious landslides, inundating the village. “So I was strongly against building this road,” Chen said.

The project went ahead anyway. “He scolded me, but I was not angry with him,” explains Zhouming Yang, the zinc factory head, responding to Chen’s concerns. “I know he was doing it for Yushichang’s good. But I still insisted on building the road to transport the construction materials for our new school. We will not let our kids continue to walk miles and miles to go to school.”

Because of the cost of the road, and the need to hire residents to carry materials from the road’s terminus to the construction site, the new school, which was completed in 2005, cost three times the usual rate, or roughly US $5,600. “I call it a ‘1,800-ton’ school, since 1,800 tons of materials were spent on building it and the new road,” Yang jokes.

But less than a year later, according to Yang, not many people are using the road. This past summer, heavy rains washed out large sections, leaving ditches and holes and returning parts of the route to their original state. “Zhe Chen doesn’t gripe about it anymore,” observes Yang. It may not be long, however, before competing viewpoints again create tensions between roads and trees in the Pumi heartland.

Yongfeng Feng is an acclaimed editor and journalist who has worked at China Guangming Daily since 1995, reporting and writing on science and technology issues. He also works as a columnist at China Economic Times, and Shenzhen Economy Daily and has published one novel and several poems.

Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author, and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.