Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

I don’t know if you can tell from any of our other posts, but we’re kind of preoccupied with the fact that we have yet to see a naturally growing forest anywhere we have traveled thus far. Instead, nearly every tree we see is planted next to its brethren of the same species in neat rows, with no undergrowth or wildlife to speak of.

On our way out of Kaifeng, we stopped in a gas station to use the bathroom but were told we would have to go across the street to a lumber market to use theirs instead. We made our way through tall stacks of logs, the smell of freshly cut wood a welcome respite from the burning-tire smell common to the outskirts of so many of the smaller Chinese cities.  When Evan and Alexis went to do their business, I was immediately surrounded by LBXes asking the usual series of questions as is prone to happen to whomever is left to watch the bikes.

Finally seeing an opening in the conversation, I asked, “So where do all these trees come from?” I inquired because in addition to the skinny poplar trees we see farmed everywhere, there were large pines in the area where I was standing – not something we’ve seen so far in the “wild.”

“Some come from southern China; others, mostly the pines, are imported from Russia,” the man with the best Mandarin in the group told me.

When Evan returned he asked why they had to import trees from Russia. “We used to get most of our pine from the Northeast (东北) of China, but now China is letting the Northeastern forests return to nature.”

The second part of that statement was a bit laughable based on what we’ve seen in the northeast – planting monoculture plots of poplar trees to be harvested every three years is hardly returning to nature. It was reminiscent of the “China is concerned about the environment now” statement at the coalmine. That is, they now make some bricks and cement out of the waste rock instead of just piling it into a mountain for future generations to deal with – just ignore how much either of those processes affects the environment. But I found the first part rather interesting.

My first reaction was to think that making something illegal in China is simply not going to make it stop as long as there is a profit to be made from it. The man’s statement contradicted so clearly with numerous secondhand reports I’ve heard about hostels in Yunnan province’s subtropical zone that arrange rainforest tours. Each year the rainforest gets further and further away from the hostels. What used to be a day trip now takes multiple days just to arrive at a place with some large trees.

But I also can’t remember the timeframe on these tales of ecological woe in Yunnan. In fact, much of China’s forested land is now indeed closed to logging, as the man indicated. After particularly severe floods on the Yangtze in 1998 that killed more than 3,000 people were linked to deforestation on the upper reaches of the river, the government banned logging in natural forests in 17 provinces, particularly along rivers. The government also implemented a “Grain-to-Green” policy to subsidize farmers on high-slope fields if they agreed to reforest the plots. The result is that between 2000 and 2005, China actually planted 20 million hectares of trees. Again, from what we’ve seen so far I have a hard time believing these are true forests that support a wide range of diverse plant and wildlife species, but we have yet to arrive in Yunnan and Sichuan where most of the logging was taking place.

Apparently the ban has had some success, at least in China, but the country’s demand for wood is not going to stop just because the government banned cutting down trees – the problem moved elsewhere. According to the Earth Policy Institute, while Asia as a whole gained 5 million hectares of forest during the 2000-2005 period, South and Southeast Asia lost 14 million due in part to massive demand from China. Of course, as with most other products, much of the demand doesn’t actually originate in China, it originates in America and Europe – it’s just that the factories that make the furniture are here and the regulatory environment is lax, to say the least.

Apparently, in 2007, China drew up rules to govern its companies involved in the wood trade internationally, although without faster access to the internet than through my cell phone on 2G, I’m having a hard time tracking down information on whether this was implemented on anything more than a trial basis.

If anyone has any more information, especially anything more recent than 2007, on illegal logging in China and China’s involvement in illegal logging elsewhere, I’d be interested to read about it. The offhand comment by a man in a lumber market in Henan will certainly give us something to look into as we eventually travel into the same mountainous areas in Yunnan and Sichuan that were devastated by logging in the 1990s. I’ll be particularly interested to see whether we end up camping in real forests or in more of the same, neat rows of high-growth trees that we’ve seen in Hebei, Shandong and now Henan.

After the exchange we headed out of the city and on a southwesterly route. A little more than a hundred kilometers later, we found a small patch of (row-planted) poplar trees in the middle of some freshly plowed fields and set up camp just as the sun was disappearing behind the row of trees that lined a road to the west.

I awoke at 5:30 the next morning to discover that Evan had gotten food poisoning from something the night before (possibly the peanuts?). We made it only 30km to the county-level town of Taikang before deciding we would have to throw in the towel and rest. This morning, Alexis was in a similar situation, and we spent another day in this strange shack-like add-on on the roof of Harmony Hotel. Unless I wake up with food poisoning tonight, we’ll be working our way south and west toward Shanghai and intend to arrive on November 4th, which will require some very dedicated riding. We intend to rest in Shanghai for a week and hope some of you can join us!

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