for breath of air
by Lijia MacLeod
Lanzhou
FROM the Great Wall, built to keep out the nomad invaders, to the Three Gorges dam, which will flood 1.3m people's homes for the world's biggest hydroelectric project, China has never shied away from seemingly impossible feats of engineering. Now the industrial city of Lanzhou, cursed by the worst pollution in the country, has embarked on its own nature-defying scheme. The authorities are planning to move a mountain to let in some much-needed fresh air.
On the slopes of Big Green Mountain, at the eastern gate of Lanzhou in central China, hundreds of peasants toil in the heat, blasting away the powdery soil with high-pressure jets of water pumped from the Yellow River below. When they started work in May, Big Green Mountain was 900ft high. Now it is 100ft shorter. By the end of next year it will have been levelled.
The scheme to flatten Big Green Mountain was born of desperation. A bleak city of 3m people, Lanzhou is set in a narrow basin and its surrounding rows of tall mountains trap the choking pollution produced by its factories and refineries. A 1994 survey of 85 Chinese cities found that Lanzhou had the dirtiest air - twice as bad as that of Beijing, the grimy capital.
More than 80% of Lanzhou's energy needs are supplied by coal; it burns about 6.4m tons a year. In winter, when coal stoves blacken the air even further, almost everyone wears white cotton masks against the smog and cold. The masks do not stay white for long.
The filth has spawned a variety of schemes to get rid of the pollution, which does not clear because for 250 to 300 days a year the city has little or no wind. Some of the schemes suggested placing huge fans on mountain tops or even suspending them from helium balloons. Others wanted to dynamite a hole in the mountains to let the city breathe.
In 1995 Xie Zhenhua, head of the National Environment Protection Bureau, toured Lanzhou and proposed removing Big Green Mountain, 20 miles to the east, altogether. This, he said, would open the city up to the region's prevailing wind.
Professors from Lanzhou University seized on the suggestion. "Imagine an enclosed room where many people smoke; open a window and the air should improve," said Chen Changhe, from the university's atmospheric science department.
The idea caught on when local businessmen spotted an opportunity to make money as well as to tackle the environmental crisis. Zhu Qihua, a native of Lanzhou who had made a fortune in China's booming coastal regions, returned to the hinterland to form a company called Lanzhou Big Green Mountain Land Development Ltd. It plans to build a high-tech industrial park when the mountain has disappeared.
Every day 10,000 gallons of water from the Yellow River are pumped to the top of the mountain to wash the soil down a zigzagging channel dug by the peasants. Altogether, 30m cubic metres of earth will be removed.
The expectations of the local people, long resentful that they can see the sky for fewer than 100 days a year, are beginning to grow. But sceptics wonder if the opening created by the demolition of Big Green Mountain will draw in as much wind as intended. Yu Xionghou, director of Lanzhou's environmental bureau, worries that people's hopes may have been raised too high.
"It is just one mountain," said Yu. "There are rows and rows of them around Lanzhou. Our environmental problem cannot be solved so easily."
However, Sun Tianqing, general manager of Big Green Mountain Land Development Ltd, will not hear of such objections. "It can only be good for the environment," he said.
Whatever the outcome, Mao Tse-tung, who led the country from 1949 until his death in 1976, would have been proud. During his Cultural Revolution, the "great helmsman" exhorted the masses to study an ancient Taoist tale, The Foolish Old Man Moves a Mountain.
In the tale, an old peasant is so determined to move two mountains blocking his way that he begins to dig. His children carry on the digging. In the end, the gods are so moved that they intervene to complete the task. Lanzhou's inhabitants are hoping the gods will smile on them, too.
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