BEIJING, Oct 25 — Ankle-deep sand blocked the door of their new home. Pushing bicycles through the yard was like wading in a bog. The “lake” part of Miaomiao Lake Village turned out to be nothing but a tiny oasis more than a mile from the cookie-cutter rows of small concrete-block houses.
Ma Shiliang, a village doctor whose family was among some 7,000 Hui Muslims whom the Chinese government had brought to this place from their water-scarce lands in the country’s northwest, said officials promised “we would get rich”. Instead, these people who once herded sheep and goats over expansive hills now feel like penned-in animals, listless and uncertain of their future.
“If we had known what it was like, we wouldn’t have moved here,” said Ma, 41, who, three years on, has been unable to get a job practicing medicine in Maiomaio Lake Village or to find other reliable work.
China calls them “ecological migrants”: 329,000 people whom the government had relocated from lands distressed by climate change, industrialisation, poor policies and human activity to 161 hastily built villages. They were the fifth wave in an environmental and poverty alleviation programme that has resettled 1,140,000 residents of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a territory of dunes and mosques and camels along the ancient Silk Road.
Han Jinlong, the deputy director of migration under Ningxia’s Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, said that although the earlier waves were not explicitly labelled ecological migrants, they had also been moved because of the growing harshness of the desert. It is the world’s largest environmental migration project.
What China is doing in Ningxia and a few other provinces hit hard by drought and other natural and man-made disasters is a harbinger of actions that governments around the globe, including the United States, could take as they grapple with climate change, which is expected to displace millions of people in the coming decades.
China has been battered by relentless degradation of the land and worsening weather patterns, including the northern drought. But mass resettlement has brought its own profound problems, embodied in the struggles of the Ma family and their neighbours.
Ma told me over tea in his living room that each household had to pay a US$2,100 (RM8,774) “resettlement fee” and was promised a plot of land to farm as the families left behind plentiful fields and animals. But those who received plots ended up having to lease them to an agriculture company, and were left with tiny front yards, where the Mas grow a few chilli plants.
The 11-member family was expected to squeeze into a 580-square-foot, two-bedroom home; like many of the migrants, Ma erected an extra room with white plastic siding in the yard for his parents.
And the officials designing the new homes put toilets in the same room as showers, an affront to the Hui Muslims. Ma dug a pit toilet outside, where the front yard meets the road.
Ma has not only been unable to get officials to appoint him as a village doctor here, but since November has also failed to find construction work — unstable and low-paying, but the most common job for the village men. The family must live mainly off the US$12 per day his wife, Wang Mei, earns in an industrial farm field.
Three of Ma’s brothers and a nephew brought a total of 38 family members as part of the resettlement. But another brother, Ma Shixiong, was one of a handful who stayed behind in Yejiahe village, a five-hour drive south, defying the government’s orders. Officials tore down the homes of the families who left — and punished those who remained by refusing to renovate their houses or build them animal pens, and denying them water pipelines and subsidies for raising sheep and cattle.
Wang Lin, who is also unemployed and was one of eight men I spoke to one afternoon following prayers at Miaomiao Lake’s Ji’an Mosque, said he and eight family members planned to return to Yejiahe next year if he does not find a job.
“No one has moved back yet, but people are talking about it,” said Wang Lin, 48. “We can farm the land there. Our homes are no longer there, but we can dig into the earth and build a cave home.”
A third of Ningxia’s population — and most of the people who have been resettled — are Hui Muslim. Some Western scholars say that Chinese resettlement policies are at least partly aimed at controlling ethnic minority populations, and that officials may cite environmental reasons as a cover.
Though remote, the parched Xihaigu area has been on the radar of the central government since at least the 1980s, when officials began producing a series of grim reports on the viability of the land. A recent estimate by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Land and Resources said the region could sustain only 1.3 million people; the population in 2014 was about 2.3 million.
“The government decided to move people out because the land couldn’t feed them,” Zhang Jizhong, the deputy director of the Ningxia Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, told me when I met with him and his colleague Han in their Yinchuan office in August. “The factors are rooted in history, nature and society.”
The road to the Mas’ old village, Yejiahe, winds uphill past a reservoir, past hills covered with soft yellow silt, past horses and haystacks in people’s yards. The landscape is wide and rolling and green, nothing like Miaomiao Lake.
We parked atop a ridge overlooking a valley. Ma Shiliang’s brother Ma Shixiong greeted me at the side of the road, dressed in a blue tunic and skullcap. His face had as many creases as the hills.
He was the man who stayed behind, even as his extended clan, including his elderly parents, had migrated northward. His wife, three of his sons and four grandchildren also remained in Yejiahe; two other sons worked at a restaurant in Beijing. About 300 villagers remained from a population of about 1,400 in the late 1990s.
Why some chose to stay, even at the cost of fracturing extended families, became clear once Ma Shixiong walked me through his home.
Compared with his brother’s place in Miaomiao Lake, it might as well have been an imperial palace. Two rows of rooms face a large courtyard. The families of two of his sons, each with two children, have their own quarters. The total area is 300 square metres — 3,229 square feet, twice the size of the housing plots in the new village.
Ma Shixiong said he had visited his family a half-dozen times in Miaomiao Lake, before their ailing father died in February 2015.
“When I first saw that place — that little yard and the little house and the little bathroom in front of the door…” he said, trailing off. “The hygiene is not good. It’s not a very civil lifestyle.”
“You don’t have land, and you need to go out to find jobs,” he added. “How can you make a living?”
As we talked, neighbours began crowding into the front room. They had heard that a reporter from Beijing was in town. Each wanted to voice a complaint about local corruption. “It’s a primitive society here because no one cares about us,” Ma Shixiong said. — The New York Times
