View of the Erhai Lake in September 2023 -- Nishino Asuka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Tings Chak
On a clear morning in June 2023, I arrived in the city of Dali, located in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, and was received by He Licheng, a local resident and farmer from nearby Gusheng Village. Like others of older generations of the region, He Licheng recalled how the pristine Erhai Lake of his childhood in the 1970s and 1980s had become so heavily polluted by the 1990s and 2000s that its signature three-petal flowers known locally as haicaihua (Ottelia acuminata), had stopped blooming.
Because the plant is extremely sensitive to pollution, its presence or absence is considered a biological indicator of water quality in the region. Due to a combination of factors in the reform and opening up period – including economic development, the rise of pesticides and fertiliser use with the “Green Revolution”, population growth, and increased tourism and migration – water quality within the Erhai basin steadily deteriorated. Looking back at the situation a decade ago, in 2013, Erhai Lake was experiencing large-scale outbreaks of blue-green algae, with the water quality deemed unsuitable for human contact. By the time of my visit a decade later, though, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture had been fundamentally transformed. As part of the central government’s targeted poverty alleviation campaign, launched in 2013 and completed in 2020, all eleven poverty-stricken counties in the prefecture, comprising thirty-four townships and 541 villages, were lifted out of extreme poverty.
In total, 413,100 people from Dali Prefecture exited extreme poverty in this campaign, part of the nearly 99 million people who did so across the country. All reached the ‘one income, two assurances, and three guarantees’ standard of living, meaning that (i) their income exceeded a minimum level, (ii) they were assured food and clothing, and (iii) they were guaranteed basic medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and free education. Alongside the targeted poverty alleviation campaign of Xi Jinping’s presidency, intensive environmental protection efforts turned the waters of Erhai Lake clean and potable again after a decades-long battle.
Already in the late 1990s, problems such as algal blooms were becoming apparent, necessitating the first measures, which included prohibiting motorised fishing boats and nets and the banning of phosphorus-containing detergents. However, these measures could not keep up with the pace of pollution and led to an economic downturn as well. In the early 2000s, Pan Yue took office as the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection – currently, he is the head of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission. As one of the youngest vice ministers ever, Pan transformed the country’s approach to environmental impact assessment, halting some of the largest projects totalling 112 billion yuan in investments and placing huge fines on violators. In a 2007 speech to a group of young students, he stated that “environmental pollution has severely constrained economic growth” and that “social injustice leads to environmental injustice, which in turn exacerbates social injustice”. Pan saw the protection of the environment as being essential – not at odds with – China’s economic growth.
It was during that time that Professor Kong Hainan, upon returning from his studies in Japan, led a team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study the polluted Erhai Lake. The findings and reports they filed led to the State Council approving a national water pollution control and treatment project in 2006. Erhai Lake became a key testing ground for Kong’s team, which discovered the most significant source of pollution to be the cultivation of a local type of single-bulb garlic on the shores of the lake. When the local government began to restrict these activities to areas beyond 200 meters from the shoreline, farmers were encouraged to plant other income-generating crop varieties and decrease or replace the use of chemical fertilisers.
Building a consensus among local growers was not an easy task and required the combined efforts of the whole community, with scientists, Communist Party of China (CPC) members, teachers, doctors, and other public officials to lead by example and ask their relatives to do the same. Kong Hainan, for example, personally communicated with the media, went door-to-door to talk with residents, heard their concerns, and convinced them that threats to the health of the lake ultimately impacted the long-term livelihood of all the residents.
Kong Hainan is among the many scientists who have made it their task to ensure the restoration of the lake, which, in turn, ensures that local government policies and measures are scientifically guided. For the last fifteen years, China Agricultural University has been exploring a “Science and Technology Courtyard” model, where graduate students are sent to the frontlines of agricultural production, living, working, and producing alongside local peasant farmers. Together, they were able to identify core problems, such as pollution sources, address practical issues at the grassroots level, and innovate to find new solutions, such as biofertilisers and pesticides. This day-to-day trust-building has been a hallmark of China’s rural campaigns, from poverty alleviation to rural revitalisation efforts.
The life trajectory of He Licheng, the local resident who received me during my visit, has been completely intertwined with that of Erhai Lake. He has been directly impacted both by the pollution and the waves of the government’s environmental measures of the past decades. Growing up in Gusheng Village, he earned his income through fishing and fish farming. In the mid-1990s, after the government ban on motorised fishing boats, he was forced to sell his boat for scrap metal. When self-built fishponds were prohibited, he moved to look for work elsewhere and returned a few years later to open a guesthouse after the government’s “village-to-village” project brought roads to his doorstep. Later, his house was among the 1,804 households that were slated for relocation into a nearby community to restore the area he lived in back to wetlands. Finally, in 2021, He Licheng contracted a piece of land in his home village to pursue rice and rapeseed farming under the guidance of the Yunnan Agricultural Reclamation Group. At the end of this long ordeal, Hi Licheng expressed his pride in contributing to protecting this collective research and is in the process of being a candidate member of the CPC.
The restoration of Erhai Lake is a concrete example of China’s ecological transformation of recent years, which aims to correct the environmental damages that came with rapid economic expansion while setting a new course in the transition to a new energy economy. In recent years, President Xi Jinping has emphasised the concept of “ecological civilisation” as one of the key elements of China’s socialist modernisation and promoted “green mountains and clear waters”, a guiding vision that sees the protection of the environment as a necessary foundation to economic and social prosperity, rather than being at odds with it. Erhai Lake is a good example of how a central government vision gets translated into practice at the local community level, combining scientific investigation, Party-led mobilisation, and grassroots democracy.
Tings Chak is a Beijing-based researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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