HAVING stood in the open-air market all day long, Mr. Guo begins collecting his goods and preparing to go back home for dinner. "I sold only two jin (500 grams) hazel nuts today. That's less than ten yuan," he says as he stomps his feet while collecting his goods. "It's so cold. Who will come out to buy things?"
It's the harshest time of the year for remote Mohe county, bordering Russia in northeast China's Daxing'an mountains. The annual deep freeze arrived in early January, pushing temperatures down to at low of minus 46 degrees Centigrade.
The hazel and pine nut Mr. Guo sells are not from the local forest. "The hazel is from America. The pine nut is from Xiaoxing'an Mountain," he says, adding, "the forest here doesn't produce pine nut, as there's no Korean pine."
For thirty years since he was 16, Guo worked as a logger for the collective in this state-owned forest. He was one of the first laid off during hard times for the forestry industry in mid 1990s, which forced him to look for a new way to make ends meet, and led him to his current way of life.
Meanwhile, 100 kilometers away in the Fuke Mountains, the Mr. Sun and his six employees are busy loading timber . "It's too far [from here to the storage area in town]. It's usually seven in the evening when we finish loading all the timber logged during the day, " he says.
There are neither permanent residents, nor paved roads. The seven of them live in a 20-square meter plastic cabin. Ten meters behind the cabin is a one-square meter plastic booth—the toilet. During the four months of intense logging, they work from five in the morning to half past seven in the evening every day. The only time they spend in the warm cabin is for eating and sleeping.
While most farmers in the northeast are killing the winter time on their kangs, or heated beds, the most important logging season has just begun. "The temperature will go on dropping. It's normal to go below minus 50 degrees Celcius," says Sun.
Despite living different lives, both Guo and Sun share a link to the regions forests, where natural disaster, mismanagement, and failed reforms charted a painful course for the region's natural resources and economic development.
A Broken Plan
Covering 84.6 thousand square kilometers of land in northeast China (approximately the same size of Austria), Daxing'an Mountain is the biggest and northernmost state-owned forest in China. It enjoys a tree coverage of 7,300 thousand hectares and 0.5 trillion cubic meters of accumulative stumpage, which stands for 7.8% of the country's total. Since logging started in February 1964, the Mountain has contributed about 1.1 trillion cubic meters of stumpage to the country's timber stocks. Recently, the Mountain's lumber has drawn 110 billion yuan each year.
But this green treasury was once forbidden to forestry workers. Back in the 1930s, when northeast China was invaded by Japan, some of the high quality timber along the Heilongjiang River was logged and shipped out on the river. After the Chinese government's reoccupation of the area, it hoped to push forward to this virgin forest through a land route instead of water, as the loading capacity on water is relatively low.
In an attempt to exploit the forest, the government sent a great number of forestry workers to the Mountain in 1956 and 1958, which proved a failure thanks to the formidable environmental conditions. "Cabbage was frozen like stones. You have to hit it with an ax if you want to eat it. You fetch water with a burlap bag in winter. You eat dried vegetable in May and June," Yu Changhai, a former official of the Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party's History in Daxinga'an Mountain Area, recalls.
Being convinced by the results of the two earlier attempts that roads are unreliable, the central government decided to exploit the Mountain by sending both workers and railway engineers in February 1964, and the Daxing'an Mountain Special Region was consequently established. In 1966, a 225 kilometer railroad was built up along the forest.
Based on the estimated accumulative stumpage of 0.7 trillion cubic meters at that time, the Special Region worked out the following plan:
One million cubic meters of timber was to be logged each year. New trees will be planted where others have been cut. In this methodology, after 70 years of logging, when the virgin forest exhausts, the trees planted earlier will have grown up for logging. In this sense the forest would be logged sustainably.
But before actually being carried out, the plan was dashed by calls for more timber "to support the country's development". Under the guideline of "giving priority to logging", the planned one-cubic meter yearly logging volume gradually rose to three million, and young trees were also ruined when mature timber was logged. To make matters worse, to accomplish their tasks, workers shifted logging areas frequently without cultivating new saplings
As wild trees slowly grew during the following years, loggers discovered that even if they cultivated saplings as planned, the 70-year cycle was still unpractical judging from the trees' short growth and the relatively barren soil of the Mountain.
"The roots of a Mongolian pine planted in 1964 are only 30 centimeters in diameter today," says Liu Jingkun, a retired local.
The "great exploitation" of the Mountain lasted until after 1980. Eventually, as the number of trees on the southern slope declined, more attention was drawn to the northern slope, where natural conditions were even more severe.
Lying on the northern slope of the Daxing'an Mountain is Mohe county, the most northernmost frontier in China. To make good use of the forestry resources there, the central government decided to make Mohe an administrative region in 1981. Later, the Xilinji Forestry Bureau, which became a part of the new county, began building the existing five subordinate forest farms, one of which is the Hedong Forest Farm.
Hedong Forest Farm then drew up a plan for its own 60-year lumber cycle. "At that time loggers were relatively well compensated," says Wang Zaikun, a retired worker on the farm. In contrast to today, the farthest logging spot then was only four to five kilometers away from the storage facility. At one point there were over 300 households on the farm.
Disaster Strikes
But a massive forest fire on May 6th 1987 put an end to six years of prosperity. All of Mohe, as well as the five forest farms administered by the Xilinji Forestry Bureau, were badly stricken.
Statistics afterwards showed that 1.01 million hectares of trees were burnt during the fire, and that the forest coverage rate of the Mountain had dropped from 76% to 61%.
Altogether, 95 million cubic meters of stumpage was destroyed—15% of the Mountain's total stumpage. Despite this seemingly small percentage, the fire had destroyed the best quality timber of the area. "The fire was the turning point for the economic development of the Daxing'an Mountain," says Zuo Fang, deputy director of Daxing'an Development and Reform Committee.
In the following three years, a great many workers and soldiers were dispatched by the local government to the region to transport the burned trees.
"Many trees in the burnt area were still alive after the fire. And as it was spring when the fire broke out, many trees were germinating, and in spite of being burnt a little by the fire, they continued to grow. But experts from the Beijing Forestry University suggested all the burnt trees be transported elsewhere, because according to them, even if those trees were able to live on, plant diseases might spread in the forest later," an official of the Xilinji Forestry Bureau recalls.
Their advice was heeded, and a massive effort to remove burned trees began. "Some of the burnt trees that escaped being cut have been growing well. Time has proven that we should have chosen a different path," says a retired official, adding that both the fire and the wide-scale cutting down of burnt trees were two unprecedented disasters for the forest.
During the cutting, over eight million cubic meters of timber was logged each year, twice the normal annual volume. As more and more timber went into the market, timber prices began dropping.
In response to contractors' desire to log good timber, some government officials made big profits by renting areas with good timber to them. But with too much timber piling up in storage and waiting for sale, forest farms couldn't pay their workers on time. "The fire brought fortune to the government officials, but caused misery to the workers," says a worker of one forest farm.
Locals had began leaving the area en masse since the early 1990s. "Form the most northern Heilongjiang province to the most southern Hainan province, Daxing'an people can be found everywhere," says Zhang Fujiang, a retired official.
No one knows exactly how many people had left the area. "Anyone who could find a way left. If they were admitted to university, or had relatives elsewhere, or had some connections, or were simply rich enough, they left, " says Zhang.
Thanks to the harsh climate—winter lasts eight months every year--and the barren soil there, the only crops that can be cultivated are potatoes and beans. The cold weather, the coarse living condition, and the areas over-reliance on one industry drove locals away.
By 1997, the accumulative stumpage of the Daxing'an Mountain had dropped from 570 million cubic meters to 170 million cubic meters. Meanwhile, the Daxing'an Forestry Corporation lost a total 120 million yuan, and owed a debt of 2.4 billion yuan, among which 400 million was still owed to unpaid workers.
Locals who had built their livelihoods on logging were helpless. As China had begun embracing market-oriented economic reforms, many small collective companies, which had long clung to big state-owned enterprises, were going bankrupt. Then came the layoffs.
"The 540,000 people in Daxing'an were confronted with the question of survival. And the only thing that occurred to them was logging," Zuo recalls.
But some had to stay, including the above-mentioned Wang Zaikun, a 63-year-old man who used to work for the Hedong Forest Farm.
After several difficult years, the farm shifted its attention onto the Fuke Mountain, which is 150 kilometers away.
In 2002, almost whole farm began moving to downtown Mohe, only leaving behind three households, one of which being Wang and his family's. "Had I moved downtown, I would have had to buy a new house, which I couldn't afford at all. Besides, I'm used to life here and don't want to change," he says.
After the farm moved out, there was no more power or water supply, or shuttles to downtown. A radio is the only electric appliance in his house. His three kids are all away from home, and he survives on his 900 yuan monthly pension.
A Break in the Clouds
Then, in 2000, a ten-year Natural Forest Protection project was launched by the State Forestry Bureau with funding by the state treasury of 500 to 700 million yuan. The fund would go into repaying debt, compensating loggers in active service, and enhance sapling cultivation, fire control, and protection in the forests.
Thanks to the project, wage owed to former workers was finally paid, laid-off workers were re-absorbed, and public infrastructure projects saw progress. The Jiagedaqi-Mohe highway and civil engineering projects in Jiagedaqi are the two most frequently mentioned examples.
After the protection project was launched, the local government lowered the yearly output of timber. In 2002, a proposal to develop local special industries was brought forward, including the precise processing of timber products, the exploitation of underground resources, biological pharmacy, biological tourism, and special species breeding.
Mining was later added as another special industry in the local government's 11th "five-year plan", as a variety of resources can be found in the Mountain, including coal, iron, lead, zinc, copper etc. Due to the rich mines and their great reserves, Zuo says mining is likely to lead the Daxing'an area to a new round of economic growth.
Hope in 2010?
Today, the only log processing companies that operate well are privately owned. For some of them, high transportation costs make it risky to increase productivity.
As for optimism over the burgeoning mining industry, professor Geng Yude of Northeast Forestry University voiced his doubts, cautioning, "First of all, underground mines are state-owned. Besides that, mining in the forest leads to environmental damage and pollution issues."
The only source for logging under the administration of Xilinji Forestry Bureau now is Fuke Mountain. "There's not too much though," says Mr. Sun, adding that although logging in this area was approved only a few years ago, people have been logging secretly there since early 1990s. Today, all of the five forest farms under the Bureau are operating in the Fuke Mountain. "By my count, there will be nothing left to log after three years," he says.
Among the 3,000 workers under the Bureau, 2,000 are working in the Fuke Mountain, the rest have traveled across the Heilongjiang River to log in Russian forests. Like Xilinji, the other bureaus in Daxing'an area are running out of resources, except for the ones that have been made natural reserves by the government. Those traveling the nine-hour train journey from Jiagedaqi to Mohe are reminded of this when they can only see newly planted trees in the forests surrounding the tracks.
Leave, or stay? As the reporter poses this question to the Daxing'an people, a glimmer of hope has been spreading around this once impressive, ancient forest:
Haven't you heard that the protection project will be extended for another seven years?
