China: Yellow Earth
In China’s Northern desert, the Great Wall is slowly vanishing. Its giant ramparts crumbling to dust. This ancient symbol of the mighty emperors weathered a millennium of war and turmoil. But it can’t survive a thousand years of wind and sand... From the desert it came and to the desert it’s returning.
These are the people of the Yellow Earth Plateau, a vast and hostile wasteland that stretches for thousands of kilometres across Northern China.
Tian Jin Ming lives in the village of Feng Chuan.It didn’t rain here for four years, the worst drought in over half a century.
Recently the rains came.. but even when there is water, the family has to make do with about a bucket and a half a day.If the well runs dry, they have to buy supplies. They’ve given up farming, because the rain came too late for anything to grow.
Tian Jin Ming: The men have to go away to make money. If they can earn some it keeps us going for a while. If they can’t we don’t have much to eat.
The family survives by sending the men out to pick the black moss that grows on the Mongolian plains 500 km away. It’s a delicacy among rich Southern Chinese. .. One bagful will buy Tian’s family enough rice to live on for two months...
So they sift through the soil for every last skerrick. They can only afford two meals a day. The children will never be sent to school.
Woman – a mother: We eat but we’re never full. We just manage.
It’s just the way it is. No grain, no water. That’s life.
Life here revolves around the search for water. A family’s most important asset is its well. They keep them locked. When rain is the only source of water, every drop must be caught and saved.
In a good year they get about 20 centimetres of rain.. but it evaporates faster than it falls. The authorities say a million people don’t even have enough water to drink.
Mr Li and his family grow what they can. There are plenty of mouths to feed, because most of the population here are Muslims and therefore exempt from the one-child policy. Keeping them fed gets harder each year.. the harsh climate and overpopulation have shrunk the amount of arable land per person by two thirds.
Mr Li: It’s difficult here. We depend on heaven. If it rains we get wheat to eat. If it doesn’t rain, we just don’t have any.There’s no rain now, so we dig sweet roots and buy grain to eat.
Generations of farming, foraging and grazing have sucked this land dry.
The ravages of humans and nature have created a landscape that the Chinese say is the most serious eroded in the world.
Each year more than 500 million tons of yellow earth is blown or washed away ... Most of it ends up in the Yellow River, which takes its name from the soil it carries, as it carves a narrow green arc across the barren plain.
Life here revolves around the river. It always has and not much has changed. They still use the traditional rafts made from inflated sheep carcasses.
The river provides a thin oasis in a sea of sand.
But when the water stops flowing, the lifeline ends..
In a country which has to feed 22 per cent of the world’s population but has only 7 per cent of the world’s arable land, the loss of farmland to desert is considered a crisis.
Madam Liu heads the Desert Control Centre at Shapotou. It was set up forty years ago, its twenty odd staff have the task of keeping the ever-shifting sands at bay.
Madam Liu: When we began there was no known method we could learn from, either inside or outside China.
The sand dunes are high, they’re close together and moving rapidly.
The main task here is keeping the desert from overtaking the railway line that links this region with the rest of China.
Madam Liu: In China we rely on the force of the masses to get things done. The world can see how we’re mobilising the masses to hold back the sand.
With the desert steadily moving in, the Chinese government come up with a grand solution. It’s a giant resettlement programme on a scale that only people who have built the great wall could dream of. It’s costing half a billion dollars and close to a million people are being moved. They’re packing up and leaving their arid mountain villages, in the hope of finding a better life.
A few 100 km to the North, this is the new promised land. The people of China’s exodus are being moved from their old desert homes... to new desert homes, on land that’s never been cultivated before. The difference is that here there’s irrigation, pumped from the Yellow River in an aqueduct that looms over the landscape.
These masses are being mobilised to break in vast new tracts of previously unfarmable land.
The Luo family packed up and came here 5 years ago. The government gave them money to move and to help build a house. It’s one of the 18 re-settlement areas that families like them are literally digging out of the sand.
Mr Luo: At first it wasn’t easy. The sand dunes were high and the wind was strong. But in recent years here things have got better. Since they brought water here it’s getting better, much better.
But it’s no land of milk and honey. Mr Luo’s neighbours say the water supply only runs for half the year. And they have to pay for it here too.
Soon the people here will have to start paying taxes and like other Chinese farmers, contributing part of their produce to the state.The bottom line for the government is that re-settlement makes good economic sense. In the long run it’s cheaper to move people to where they can produce and - like good modern Communist citizens - pay their own way.
There’s another reason too. As one local official told us, if we let people starve they’ll lose faith in our party.
Mr Luo: Our life before in the mountains was extremely hard. Life is much more comfortable here.Before we had to lock our wells. Otherwise people would steal our water and we wouldn’t have enough to drink ourselves.Now we don’t have to lock it. We can drink all the water we like.
By the end of the decade a million settlers will have moved in to tame and cultivate this rugged land.
Woman: This life right now is hard, but it’ll get better. For now we have to borrow food to eat.
Interviewer: What do you expect to see here in a few years’ time?
Couple: We’ll just flatten the land and after a year or two it will be useable.After it’s flattened and irrigated, it’ll be fine.
Once the land is ready, the rest of the family will join them here, 15 in all.
Some who’ve come here have left and gone home again, finding the new life harder than the old.But the faithful believe the future will be fine.
Man: We’re lucky we can move here.
Woman: A lot of people want to come but they can’t.
Their generation will be better off than ours. We just have to put up with the hardship first. If we don’t, who will?
In China’s Northern desert, the Great Wall is slowly vanishing. Its giant ramparts crumbling to dust. This ancient symbol of the mighty emperors weathered a millennium of war and turmoil. But it can’t survive a thousand years of wind and sand... From the desert it came and to the desert it’s returning.
These are the people of the Yellow Earth Plateau, a vast and hostile wasteland that stretches for thousands of kilometres across Northern China.
Tian Jin Ming lives in the village of Feng Chuan.It didn’t rain here for four years, the worst drought in over half a century.
Recently the rains came.. but even when there is water, the family has to make do with about a bucket and a half a day.If the well runs dry, they have to buy supplies. They’ve given up farming, because the rain came too late for anything to grow.
Tian Jin Ming: The men have to go away to make money. If they can earn some it keeps us going for a while. If they can’t we don’t have much to eat.
The family survives by sending the men out to pick the black moss that grows on the Mongolian plains 500 km away. It’s a delicacy among rich Southern Chinese. .. One bagful will buy Tian’s family enough rice to live on for two months...
So they sift through the soil for every last skerrick. They can only afford two meals a day. The children will never be sent to school.
Woman – a mother: We eat but we’re never full. We just manage.
It’s just the way it is. No grain, no water. That’s life.
Life here revolves around the search for water. A family’s most important asset is its well. They keep them locked. When rain is the only source of water, every drop must be caught and saved.
In a good year they get about 20 centimetres of rain.. but it evaporates faster than it falls. The authorities say a million people don’t even have enough water to drink.
Mr Li and his family grow what they can. There are plenty of mouths to feed, because most of the population here are Muslims and therefore exempt from the one-child policy. Keeping them fed gets harder each year.. the harsh climate and overpopulation have shrunk the amount of arable land per person by two thirds.
Mr Li: It’s difficult here. We depend on heaven. If it rains we get wheat to eat. If it doesn’t rain, we just don’t have any.There’s no rain now, so we dig sweet roots and buy grain to eat.
Generations of farming, foraging and grazing have sucked this land dry.
The ravages of humans and nature have created a landscape that the Chinese say is the most serious eroded in the world.
Each year more than 500 million tons of yellow earth is blown or washed away ... Most of it ends up in the Yellow River, which takes its name from the soil it carries, as it carves a narrow green arc across the barren plain.
Life here revolves around the river. It always has and not much has changed. They still use the traditional rafts made from inflated sheep carcasses.
The river provides a thin oasis in a sea of sand.
But when the water stops flowing, the lifeline ends..
In a country which has to feed 22 per cent of the world’s population but has only 7 per cent of the world’s arable land, the loss of farmland to desert is considered a crisis.
Madam Liu heads the Desert Control Centre at Shapotou. It was set up forty years ago, its twenty odd staff have the task of keeping the ever-shifting sands at bay.
Madam Liu: When we began there was no known method we could learn from, either inside or outside China.
The sand dunes are high, they’re close together and moving rapidly.
The main task here is keeping the desert from overtaking the railway line that links this region with the rest of China.
Madam Liu: In China we rely on the force of the masses to get things done. The world can see how we’re mobilising the masses to hold back the sand.
With the desert steadily moving in, the Chinese government come up with a grand solution. It’s a giant resettlement programme on a scale that only people who have built the great wall could dream of. It’s costing half a billion dollars and close to a million people are being moved. They’re packing up and leaving their arid mountain villages, in the hope of finding a better life.
A few 100 km to the North, this is the new promised land. The people of China’s exodus are being moved from their old desert homes... to new desert homes, on land that’s never been cultivated before. The difference is that here there’s irrigation, pumped from the Yellow River in an aqueduct that looms over the landscape.
These masses are being mobilised to break in vast new tracts of previously unfarmable land.
The Luo family packed up and came here 5 years ago. The government gave them money to move and to help build a house. It’s one of the 18 re-settlement areas that families like them are literally digging out of the sand.
Mr Luo: At first it wasn’t easy. The sand dunes were high and the wind was strong. But in recent years here things have got better. Since they brought water here it’s getting better, much better.
But it’s no land of milk and honey. Mr Luo’s neighbours say the water supply only runs for half the year. And they have to pay for it here too.
Soon the people here will have to start paying taxes and like other Chinese farmers, contributing part of their produce to the state.The bottom line for the government is that re-settlement makes good economic sense. In the long run it’s cheaper to move people to where they can produce and - like good modern Communist citizens - pay their own way.
There’s another reason too. As one local official told us, if we let people starve they’ll lose faith in our party.
Mr Luo: Our life before in the mountains was extremely hard. Life is much more comfortable here.Before we had to lock our wells. Otherwise people would steal our water and we wouldn’t have enough to drink ourselves.Now we don’t have to lock it. We can drink all the water we like.
By the end of the decade a million settlers will have moved in to tame and cultivate this rugged land.
Woman: This life right now is hard, but it’ll get better. For now we have to borrow food to eat.
Interviewer: What do you expect to see here in a few years’ time?
Couple: We’ll just flatten the land and after a year or two it will be useable.After it’s flattened and irrigated, it’ll be fine.
Once the land is ready, the rest of the family will join them here, 15 in all.
Some who’ve come here have left and gone home again, finding the new life harder than the old.But the faithful believe the future will be fine.
Man: We’re lucky we can move here.
Woman: A lot of people want to come but they can’t.
Their generation will be better off than ours. We just have to put up with the hardship first. If we don’t, who will?