thresh crops in the road. For a while I wondered if this local campaign had been effective: the City Special hadn’t smashed a pile of grain since entering western Shanxi. But then I visited Sigou, a village high atop the eastern bank, where locals told me that they hadn’t harvested any grain crops at all this year because of drought. They were surviving on potatoes and government grain. While I was talking to a farmer in his cave home, the village chief stopped by with a sheaf of relief applications. The forms were entitled “The Two Lacks and the One Without.” The village chief explained the phrase: the people in Sigou lacked money and food, and they were without the ability to support themselves. Of all the slogans I had seen, that was the most brutally honest, and it marked a grim end to the north-central farmland—the last gasp of the loess plateau.
Across the river lay the Ordos Desert and the beginning of western China. In ancient times, the Ordos represented one of the most troubling regions for the empire, and there is no other part of the steppes that played such a major role in the inspiration of the Great Wall. The Ordos is expansive—roughly the size of New England—and it’s defined by the great northern loop of the Yellow River. Within this loop, the loess plateau gives way to sand and scrubland, and in ancient times there was never enough water to support traditional Chinese agriculture. But resources were adequate for nomads, for whom the Ordos represented a perfect base: remote enough to avoid control by Chinese settlements, but within range for raiding trips. Some dynasties, like the Tang, were able to staff garrisons across the desert, but the Ming became too weak to fight in the region.
Instead they constructed the Great Wall across the southern borderlands of the Ordos, in what is now Shaanxi Province. Driving west from the Yellow River, I searched for traces of fortifications that had been marked on my map. The pages had suddenly emptied: there were few villages and almost no roads. On the atlas, the white space was occasionally interrupted by short-lived streams—anonymous streaks of blue that came out of nowhere, flowed for a dozen miles, and then vanished back into the sand. Outside my windows the landscape was featureless. I drove through a town called Divine Tree, and then I continued to Yulin, which means “Elm Forest”—another hopeful name in this barren place.
North of town the Great Wall was in the process of being buried. A huge Ming fort called Zhenbeitai stood stark against the horizon, and the wall ran southwest into the desert. It was made of tamped earth, a slightly darker shade than the sand that piled against its base. Sometimes the structure disappeared entirely beneath a dune. In the east, where I had started my journey, the wall had often accentuated the permanence of the Hebei landscape. Those had been rocky, solid mountains, and the structures of brick and stone seemed secure atop high ridgelines. Westward, Chinese geography became less stable with every mile, until from a driver’s perspective it felt as if the land itself was collapsing. I had moved from the stony peaks to the dry steppes, and then to the crumbling hills of the loess plateau, and now at last I had arrived in shifting desert sands. The Great Wall was still here, but it no longer spoke of permanence. The Ordos was creeping south, and even the most impressive Ming fortifications were nothing more than lines in the sand.
Beyond the wall, people were trying to reform the barren landscape. This battle is common in the north—more than one-fourth of China’s land suffers from desertification, and the total area of stricken regions expands by an estimated 1,300 square miles every year. According to the United Nations, four hundred million Chinese live in places threatened by desertification. Various government projects attempt to make northern life more sustainable, and they range from local tree planting to major irrigation programs. The most ambitious is the Yangtze diversion. Realizing that parts of the south have plenty of water, the government has initiated a ten-billion-dollar project designed to rechannel some of these resources to the north. But it’s unclear how effective this solution will be, and in the end it may be pointless to bring water north while most young people are heading south.
The Ordos is one part of northern China that never should have been settled by farmers in the first place. In ancient times only nomads inhabited this region, but during the nineteenth century Chinese pioneers began to move north, driven by poverty and war. After the revolution of 1949, the Communists encouraged mass settlement beyond the Great Wall, hoping that Chinese-style agriculture would flourish in the desert north of Yulin. They sponsored periodic campaigns to plant trees, grass, and even rice; the few local streams and lakes were diverted for irrigation. The natives, who were mostly Mongol herdsmen, invariably resisted these projects, telling officials that they wouldn’t work, but politics had a way of overwhelming experience. During the 1960s and 1970s, in the heat of the Cultural Revolution, one local township called Wushenqi became celebrated nationwide as a model commune. Other desert regions were instructed to follow its lead, digging irrigation channels and planting grain. But by the 1980s it was clear that Wushenqi’s efforts had been disastrous—the combination of increased population and non-native crops had destroyed precious water resources.
In recent years the local government had adopted a new strategy. Instead of planting rice or grain, they seeded willow trees, and then they used the leaves to feed sheep. They called it “the pasture in the sky”—they plucked the sheep fodder straight from the willow branches, and the trees were also intended to halt the desert’s expansion. In some ways this worked: the township’s agricultural territory was holding steady at 10 percent of the total land, and locals had been able to expand their herds. I visited the home of one Mongolian family that cared for two hundred head of sheep. “Everything is better now,” the patriarch told me. “It’s easier to get food, easier to get clothes.” He spoke halting Mandarin, and he told me that he had grown up in a traditional Mongol ger, or tent. Now he lived in a brick home, where the walls were decorated with one poster of a Ferrari Mondial and another of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. There was also a map of China, two portraits of Genghis Khan, and a shrine dedicated to Mao Zedong. When I asked about the shrine, the man said, “Mao was a liberator, a great leader, and a good man.” He added that all true Mongols keep portraits of Genghis Khan. On another wall hung a framed government prize that the man had received for paying his taxes on March 20, 1997. In rural homes I often saw prizes like this—sometimes people got awards for keeping their houses clean.
In Wushenqi, though, it seemed that any benefits of willow planting would be short-lived. A Chinese-born geographer named Jiang Hong was conducting research in the region, and she told me that the groundwater was dropping. The desert simply couldn’t support any additional agriculture, not even the willow trees. But Jiang Hong had also noticed that locals remained supportive of the planting project, despite the fact that they knew about the dwindling groundwater. This was different from the past, when there had always been resistance to heavy-handed government campaigns. Back then, projects tended to be abstract and collective: Mao would declare that China’s productivity needed to surpass that of Great Britain or the United States, and a herdsman in a place like Wushenqi was reluctant to destroy his environment for such goals. But ever since Deng Xiaoping, the economy had been driven primarily by individual motivation, and rewards were suddenly tangible. And the new mobility meant that many people had caught a glimpse of a better life.
“They see more of the outside world now,” Jiang Hong said. “They can visit the cities, and they see things on television. They want to have more of the material benefits that they see.” In a sense, people had become more worldly, but this contact with the outside was disorienting. The frame of reference no longer consisted of the limited resources available in Wushenqi, but rather the infinite products available in the city. By learning more about other places, residents had lost touch with their immediate environment.
And decades of political instability had warped people’s mindsets. “When things change so quickly, people don’t have time to gain information about their environment,” Jiang Hong said. “If you look back at Chinese history from 1949, policies have changed so often. When the reforms took hold in the 1980s, people saw that as an opportunity—and you have to take the opportunity now because it won’t last. People tend to have a short-term view of development.”
For this generation, the economic landscape had become as unstable as the Ordos sands. Everything
