A Country With No Big Trees

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One of the biggest priorities in China today, according to the central government, is to “save energy and reduce emissions.” But a narrow focus on how much carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, or other pollution needs to be eliminated from the atmosphere will not be enough to remedy the country’s worsening environmental condition. Another important indicator of environmental health is the quantity and quality of big trees the country harbors.

Today, large trees are rare in China. The country will need to take efforts to nurture them in the years ahead. Only when the landscape is covered with thick, lush forests and exuberant ecosystems can we say it has really survived its most dire environmental woes.

The exploitation of trees in China dates back thousands of years. Before the 20th century, the major destructive force was the elite ruling class of a highly centralized society, including emperors and their families, officials, and rich businesspeople. They constructed luxurious palaces and houses, and extravagant tombs. Those structures required huge quantities of timber. Places that served as political and economic centers were the first to be denuded.

One example is the area in and around Beijing, which has served as China’s political capital for nearly 800 years. To meet the construction demands of palaces and mansions, residents cut down trees along the city’s Yong Ding River valley. Intensive felling deteriorated the ecosystem, and the river saw increased flooding. During the Qing Dynasty, 200 years ago, a major flood occurred every three years. This trend has only slowed since 1954, when a reservoir was built on the river. Today, only low and thin trees line the waterway, and it will take hundreds of years to see them grow into huge ones.

Guan Zhong Region is another example. Covering Xi’an, Xianyang, Tongchuan, and Weinan cities in Shaanxi Province, the area served as the political and cultural center during the more than 1,000 years between the Qin and Tang Dynasties. It suffered from continuous intensive agricultural exploitation and ecological disaster. Every inch of the land was exploited, leaving little room for ecosystem regeneration. While trees remain today, they comprise only a few varieties and are small in height. Most of this vegetation is in the form of greenbelts between farm plots, along roadsides, or dispersed intermittently around villages. They are mostly poplar trees planted by local residents, to be felled once they mature.

Cutting down large trees and replacing them with saplings is a common phenomenon in Chinese cities. Residents have built houses and roads on sites where big trees used to stand, and they continue to cut down more of them to make room for the nation’s urban expansion.

In the past, the Chinese forestry authority targeted its efforts mainly at developing the timber economy. It was not until 2002 that it began considering its role in ecosystem protection. Yet it continues to hold as its major mandate the tasks of planting trees, developing fast-growing and high-yielding plantations, and nurturing the timber and forest products industry.

It is not uncommon for forestry officials to term mountain areas with natural-growing vegetation “mountain wastelands,” or large areas of healthy natural forest “low-yielding” or “inferior” forests, and to mobilize social forces to cut down these trees and replace them with conifer, pine, or eucalyptus plantations that have high economic value. The Chinese people have been felling and planting trees for decades—and the country’s afforestation rate is in fact increasing—but the ecological benefits may actually be decreasing. The more forests are cleared, the fewer big trees there are left.

Forests are especially vulnerable when large machinery is available, and when an entire population is galvanized by the desire to become better off through all possible means. The Xing’anling Mountains in northeastern China, which were once covered with thick natural forests, have been denuded as a result of several decades of mechanized cutting. What remains are mostly small trees and bushes, and it will take thousands of years for the region to recover its former look.

In southwestern China, forests at the head of several major river arteries would have met the same fate if the historic Yangtze River flooding in 1998 had not alarmed the government and forced it to adopt prompt conservation measures. And forests on the Qinling Mountains in central China’s Shaanxi Province have receded by at least 150 meters, causing surface water shortages and declines in groundwater.

About half of China’s population is rural villagers who rely heavily on trees for their daily lives. When cultivation of their meager plots cannot provide sufficient income, they naturally turn their attention to trees. With great enthusiasm, they cut down natural forests and plant economically valuable trees and other vegetation, including orchids, firs, herbs, bamboos, and eucalyptus. They then sell their harvests to timber-processing companies.

Meanwhile, special interest groups, including the logging and paper industries, are also encroaching on China’s remaining forests. They lease thousands of hectares of mountains using whatever means possible, fell and burn down all the natural vegetation, and plant monoculture plantations of economically valuable trees. They use chemically intensive fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides to ensure the growth of the plantations. The trees are then logged according to their growth cycles, in anywhere from five years to two decades.

This trend to grow trees like grass and treat mountains like arable land has engulfed the entire country. The direct consequence is that natural forests are disappearing quickly, and China is becoming a nation with no big trees. The very few remaining large tree stands can only be found in nature conservation areas.

In 1998, the Chinese government enacted its widely hailed “natural forest protection” policy, which likely represents the nation’s first major corrective measure in thousands of years of rampant logging. But it takes patience to nurture trees, and this is exactly what is lacking in today’s China. People’s eyes glimmer with greed and an eagerness to get rich, and to many of them, natural forests provide an easy resource to exploit.

China Watch is a joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI) and is supported by the blue moon fund.