The history of China takes many forms. The Communist party produces official histories, of course, which support the narrative of preordained Marxist triumphs—resulting in more than a fair share of elisions and omissions. The missing chapters include the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation that followed, as well as the Cultural Revolution, while the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 can only be discovered in the work of scholars overseas.
There are also more personal histories, the experiences of individuals and their close relatives, remembered down generations but often kept private, a language of the past that can explain a family’s present and define its future. Sometimes these experiences are framed by older beliefs and shaped by higher narratives that are invoked to explain the otherwise inexplicable. In these histories, the hungry ghost is a recurring actor, as in Alice Mah’s memoir, Red Pockets.
The importance of respect for the dead in China is widely understood: an unsatisfied spirit can exact a terrible revenge, hence the need to sweep the graves once a year and leave offerings of food. The subtitle of Alice Mah’s book, An Offering, reflects these annual acts of appeasement.
Large numbers of hungry ghosts are even worse. When the Cultural Revolution reached southwest China in the mid-1960s, bewildered villagers found the best explanation for the chaos that had been unleashed on their lives in the tens of millions whom the state had starved to death in the Great Leap Forward—they were clearly bent on revenge. By contrast, Alice Mah’s hungry ghost, to whom she attributes months of unexplained illness, was more particular to her.
In the growing genre of stories involving émigré Chinese families whose subsequent generations return in search of their roots, few are as uncomfortable as Mah’s. Visiting China in 2018 to study the severe pollution that resulted from rapid industrialisation, Mah, now an academic at Glasgow university, took a side trip to her ancestral village.
It was not a happy experience. Not only did everyone in the village seem to have their hands out for cash-filled red envelopes, but she found herself haunted by the story of her great-grandfather’s second wife, a woman who killed herself during the Cultural Revolution for fear of being persecuted for owning a small plot of land. The woman had since been written out of family history and her grave neglected. There are two kinds of pollution, Mah observes. The first is the material pollution that burns away her sense of smell, which she feels she knows well. The other is more spiritual and led to the neglect of the woman’s grave. After that visit, during the Covid pandemic, Mah began to feel the hungry ghost’s unwelcome attention.
The environmental crisis that Mah had gone to study was the cumulative effect of unregulated pollution, the dark side of what many were hailing as China’s economic miracle, the frenetic dash for growth and legitimacy that the regime undertook after the crisis unleashed by Tiananmen. In a way, economic progress was the party’s response to Tiananmen’s vengeful spirits.
By many measures, it was a success: nearly two decades of double-digit growth, industrialisation, a boom in infrastructure building and exports. But there were other results, lived by the citizens, which went officially unreported for many years, including toxic air, terrible water contamination, epidemic levels of cancer and soil pollution so severe that, as Mah reports, most of the rice grown in China contained dangerous levels of heavy metals. These horrors had global significance, too. China became the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2005, and the warming graph kept on climbing.
The story of China’s pollution crisis and the struggle to reverse it is told in forensic detail in Ma Tianjie’s In Search of Green China. Ma lived most of it as an activist and (I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure) more recently worked as the Beijing director of China Dialogue, the multilingual environment and climate platform that I founded in 2006. He explores the policies that produced this crisis; resistance to them and it; and the largely successful campaign to change China’s development model to one that accounted for the environmental damage.
If it did not change, China would experience catastrophic environmental collapse
It was a long battle against an entrenched and self-regarding bureaucracy that clung to the proposition that China could not afford to worry about environmental damage until it was rich enough to address the problem. That proposition was refuted by a prominent official, vice minister Pan Yue, who pointed out that if it did not change, China would experience a catastrophic environmental collapse long before it grew rich.
The battle to change China’s development model was initiated by people in the lively and determined civil society that emerged in the late 1990s. In many cases, they formed alliances with enlightened officials in underpowered environmental posts, who were themselves battling giant state-owned enterprises.
There were several notable heroes in these long campaigns: Liang Congjie, a descendant of a famous Qing dynasty reforming official, who founded Friends of Nature, China’s first environmental NGO, in 1994; Wang Yongchen, a journalist who led a sustained campaign against the dams proposed on the last wild rivers in southwest China; Huo Daishan, the son of an army officer whose 15,000 photographs exposed awful pollution on the Huai River; Xie Zhenhua, a courageous senior official who was to become China’s longest-serving climate negotiator; and Pan Yue, the aforementioned vice minister in the then Environmental Protection Agency, who parleyed a gift for publicity into an influence that went well beyond his pay grade.
Against them was a powerful coalition of interests that argued for “develop first, clean up later”—and worked to resist both accurate monitoring and control of pollution, as well as serious estimates of the economic and human costs of the damage. State and provincial officials were expected to grow their local economies and formed alliances with the businesses and factories that were causing the problem. It was a literally toxic mutual dependence: the officials depended on the enterprises to deliver results, while the enterprises depended on the officials to turn a blind eye. Since local environmental protection bureaus were also under local political control, this was not difficult.
But the public was angry about the pollution that blighted their daily lives—and, in the decade that followed the turn of the century, they took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest against proposed waste incinerators and chemical plants, forcing local officials to relocate entire factories to defuse tensions. The clean-up-later approach was beginning to fail.
China did eventually change its model, but at a cost. The accession of Xi Jinping, and the adoption of “eco-civilisation” as a new development model in which nature was regarded as an asset, did indeed shift the state’s balance in favour of the environment—even if the execution of that model remains a work in progress. But while the state had taken up the ideas of the early campaigners, Xi’s regime also harbours deep suspicions of civil society, shared with, and perhaps learned from, Vladimir Putin. Nature has benefited hugely from the activists’ efforts, but the clear message today is: no more activism.
