Da Jilu/zh-en/Band 3
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| 中文 (Original) | English (Translation) |
|---|---|
| book = Da Jilu |title = 大记录 Band 3 (中文) |prev = Da_Jilu/zh/Band_2 |next = Da_Jilu/zh/Band_4 }} |
All this seemed unrelated to the Yellow River, but in fact it was closely connected. With forests and vegetation intact, soil and water do not wash away, and sediment cannot drift restlessly downstream. At the same time, the Yellow River—like a vital bloodstream in this region's ecological network—continuously supplied clear, nourishing water. The grasslands did not thirst, and neither did the birds or the beasts. |
| = 大记录 — 卷三 = 卷三 — Der Weg nach Kunshan, Flug zum Weltraumhafen, u.a. |
Thus the Yellow River wrote a magnificent epic: sometimes peaceful, sometimes stirred, sometimes resting in quiet lakes, sometimes rushing through high gorges and dangerous valleys. |
| ---- | Its water shared the color of the surrounding trees and grasses, its calm stretches were like the embrace of the Yellow River Mother, its surging force was a high song—one it had to sing whenever it met obstacles and conflict—praising nature's strength and stirring courage in the weak. No sediment. No disasters. |
| 昆山之路 | The Yellow River and the Loess Plateau were inseparable—not only because, for thousands of years, yellow sand had rolled into the river, but because more than 4,000 years ago this entire region was covered in continuous primeval forests with abundant water sources and rich soil. Together, they nurtured the history of the Chinese nation and produced the world-renowned Yellow River civilization. According to ancient records, during the Zhou Dynasty the Loess Plateau held about 480 million mu of forest—roughly 32 million hectares—and forest coverage across the Yellow River basin reached 53 percent. |
| 杨守松 | Such a majestic landscape—forests and rivers intertwined—became unimaginable to later generations. People could only marvel that humanity, with such primitive tools and backward productivity, had possessed the power to destroy so much: cutting tree after tree, using axe after axe. A brief period of farming prosperity was followed by centuries of desolation, drought, and disaster. Even today, with productivity and science advanced enough to astonish the moon, people still cannot “make the Yellow River run clear.” These words survive only as lofty slogans in textbooks and propaganda manuals. |
| 开头（之一） | For most of China's long slave and feudal eras, agriculture was the core of the economy and the foundation of daily life. Farmers produced simply to have enough to eat. Centuries of poverty and hardship gradually wore down many of the virtues once treasured by the Chinese people, such as those teaching them to accept mere survival and temporary peace. At the same time, farmers had no choice but to clear forests and grasslands to create farmland—securing the most basic necessities in the simplest way, while leaving behind extraordinarily complex and enormous problems for future generations. |
| 中国是ー个梦。 | Take the historically recorded “two Han prosperities” as an example. In the late Western Han, 8 million qing of land were reclaimed for farming; in the Eastern Han, another 7 million qing. By then, the forests of the Yellow River basin had been completely felled. Trees and grasslands were burned to ash. Nearly all the land in the basin had been reclaimed. The crops grew, the fields spread endlessly, and farmers' taxes supported the prosperity of both Han dynasties. But the same prosperity also marked the beginning of the Yellow River basin's decline and disaster. Today, across these 430,000 square kilometers, there are thousands of gullies and ravines, severe soil and water loss, and everywhere the eye falls—barren hills, exposed ridges, vast wastelands. |
| 十月革命一声炮响,马列主义顺势而入,从此中国便做起了社会主义的梦。30 多年以后,有500年历史的故都北京在一夜之间,所有的城门钥匙都换了主人,共 和国国旗在28响礼炮声中冉冉升起。 | This was not the Yellow River of yesterday. |
| 又过了 40年,东欧局势如雪山崩塌,中国梦也变得沉重,变得空前地艰难…… | Yellow River, you cannot explain this, nor can you wash it clean—so you turned yellow, becoming the river with the highest sediment load in the world. During the flood season, sediment made up 50 percent of your flow—turning the Yellow River into a pot of mud. With the river's annual 1.6 billion tons of downstream sediment, you could build a one-meter-high, one-meter-wide embankment around the Earth thirty-two times. Each year, the Yellow River carried away 40 million tons of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—equal to every mu of farmland in the nation losing 25 kilograms of fertilizer (about 375 kilograms per hectare). An American friend once told me that the Yellow River does not carry sediment away—it carries away the blood of the Chinese nation. Not a ruptured capillary, but the bleeding of a main artery. |
| 开头（之ニ） | We were citizens of this hemorrhaging nation. Our spirits were depleted, our complexions sallow. At times we suffered neurasthenia; at times our hands and feet went numb. Our eyes betrayed us—nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism. Suspicious, jealous, narrow in our affections—yet even so, we gave blood willingly. |
| 1968年最后一天,ー辆破旧的三轮车把我从火车站拉进了破旧的小城。低矮 的屋檐,窄窄的街道,随处可见歪斜的马桶刷子和飘零的裤裆片;冬日的太阳只是 象征性地画了半个圆便匆匆归去了一ー6点不到,小城便寂寞地进入了梦乡。 | From the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Tang, people gradually turned their gaze toward the Yangtze River basin—fortunate, perhaps, that heaven had granted us two great rivers. But the Yangtze, too, began to suffer severe soil erosion and water loss. Warnings that it might become a second Yellow River had been sounded for years. Even then, forests in the upper Yangtze were still being cut. |
| 第二天,我就到城东的西河村“接受贫下中农再教育” 〇 | Do we have a third great river? |
| 城边上也有不少草屋。全县有好几万户。 | In the new era, a book on environmental catastrophe became widely read—perhaps not “as costly as paper in Luoyang,” but eagerly sought by people along both sides of the Hongru River in the Zhumadian region. The great Henan flood of 1976 first entered the public consciousness through the work of a reporter who later became a writer. |
| 这就是“天堂”。这也叫“天堂”？ | The flood struck with terrifying force. In the basins of the Hongru, Shaying, and Tangbai—tributaries of the Yellow River—three days of unbroken torrential rain fell, 800 to 1,000 millimeters in all. The Banqiao and Shimantan reservoir dams could no longer hold and finally collapsed. The suffering that followed has already been recorded in that book; this text will not recount it again. |
| “穷山恶水血吸虫”,一位县委书记对苏州的昆山做了这个形象的概括。 | I searched through the past with one question in mind: were the breaches at Banqiao and Shimantan truly unavoidable? If those two reservoirs had held firm, countless people could have been spared the tragedy. Later investigations proved that the upstream and surrounding areas of both dams had endured years of forest destruction and severe vegetation damage; forest cover had dropped to just 20 percent. Under the same torrential rains, the Baoshan and Dongfeng reservoirs remained safe, protected by forests with 90 percent coverage—saving countless lives and immense wealth. |
| 忽然间这一切都飘逝了、消失了。老城焕然一新,新区拔地而起。西河的草棚 变成了瓦屋,变成了楼房,又变成了厂房和办公楼。56米宽的马路横穿腹部,几十 家企业变魔术一般相继出现。冰箱、彩电已进入寻常百姓家,录像机也正在悄然潜 入农户家中……城乡处处欢声笑语,车水马龙;一年四季商贾云集,游人如织…… | Sudden disasters always catch people unprepared, yet the reservoirs that failed had been showing warnings for years. Reports urging a halt to deforestation were issued repeatedly, but nothing changed; efforts were either ineffective or entirely futile. Our people of the Central Plains had even cut down the small forests that had struggled to grow in the Yellow River floodplain—how, then, could the thick stands of trees around reservoir areas have been spared? |
| 过去说,“小昆山”“小六子”,现在改了,叫“小上海”“小蛇口 不是天堂,但可与天堂媲美。 | The waters of the Banqiao and Shimantan reservoirs were often turbid. Even after ordinary light or moderate rain, sediment flowed in together with the runoff. Each year, silt accumulated by 30 to 40 centimeters, steadily reducing reservoir capacity. Faced with torrential downpours, how could these reservoirs not collapse? |
| 开头（之三） | By contrast, the Baoshan and Dongfeng reservoirs normally held clear water among green forests. Their annual sediment buildup was just 1.3 centimeters. During heavy rains, the large surrounding trees absorbed up to a ton of water each day, preventing sediment loss and, in doing so, protecting the reservoirs themselves. |
| 我和他的驾驶员周一起喝酒。假如他也在,我一定会敬他ー杯。尽管我知道 他是滴酒不沾的。事实上,我也不会喝酒……我曾经做过他的秘书,只是连我自己 也无法相信的是,近1〇年来,我和他说话的时间通通加起来也不到1分钟。我是 跑跑写写而不会说说笑笑的那一类秘书。关于他,我从来没想到要说点什么或写 点什么。但此时此刻,我却急于想见到他,并且想到应该说点什么也写点什么。这 种强烈的欲望全是因为他的“退”而触发的。我忽然想到他的可贵,他的了不起。 我甚至妄想和他讨论一下“社会主义”这个大题目一凭直觉,他是有自己的见解 的。他一直在做,做的人最有发言权。 | Are these not the renewed revelations of the flood? |
| 借着酒劲,我找到了他的家。因为坦诚,只几分钟,我们便各自理解了对方。 | Everything was so simple. Since ancient times, we once had forests—then we cut them down. We once suffered the bitterness of floods—yet still we did not cherish the trees. Our ancestors left us disaster; we hand down multiplied disaster to our descendants. Save the forests. Save the generations to come. |
| 第一章借东风催开花千树 | Humanity suffers many calamities; the forests suffer just as many. The forests that protect us often endure the very disasters we force upon them. The deeper mystery of nature is this: over time, humanity realizes that many punishments are self-inflicted. |
| ー、1+! 乂2 | The great fire in the Greater Khingan Range was sparked by a few illegal operators. But its seeds were planted long before by negligent bureaucrats. In those green forests of brilliant sunlight and fresh air, at least one corner remained dark. When the flames finally swallowed Mohe, they still could not swallow the county magistrate's residence. As the fire raged through the trees, a fire chief actually ordered fire trucks not to put out the blaze or rescue the people, but to protect the magistrate and his home. To make the protection more “effective,” bulldozers pushed down the homes surrounding the magistrate's residence. There could be no more vivid or concrete example than this! |
| 大上海旁边有个小昆山。昆山虽小,每年却能卖几亿斤商品粮。“田多劳少, 产量不高,贡献不小,分配蛮好。”这是在全县流传的顺ロ溜。自给自足也自满自 足。小昆山小乐胃也见出明显的小家子气。 | At its root, the forest crisis was not caused by rampant logging alone. The common wealth of humanity was no longer regarded as the common property of humanity. Those who governed the forests did not understand humanity's place in nature; they did not see forests as our mothers or our companions, but merely as resources to be cut. Bureaucrats entrusted with authority over the forests, armed with bureaucratic privileges, became emperors of the woods—forest rulers, forest owners. Their priorities were not the interests of the forests, but the interests of officials. |
| 忽然有一天,小昆山发现周围的世界大热闹也大变样了。江阴、无锡的乡镇企 业突飞猛进。张家港、常熟也急起直追。唯独昆山自得其乐,稳坐钓鱼台…… | In the nationalized forests, officials freely used state authority and modern equipment for personal gain. It became as routine as offering wine in a wine-producing region—only here, timber was the preferred currency of corruption. And where timber held the highest value, the shadows were darkest. |
| 1984年,姗姗来迟的春风例行公事一般给昆山抹了些许绿意,与往昔不同的 倒是给年过半百的吴克铃捎来ー顶“县长”的乌纱帽。 | We could calculate the losses from the Great Khingan fire, but we could never calculate how much precious timber from the Great Khingan Range had, over the course of more than a decade, filled the private pockets of so many. That was destruction in its most devastating form—where the wicked prospered, the good were punished, and both people and forests were left in despair. |
| 这是ー个不寻常的年代。改革开放唤醒了沉睡5000余年的土地,蕴藏在10 亿人血液里的一切善和恶,一切积极因素和消极因素都释放出来了。国土热火朝 天,国人眼花缭乱,国家日新月异…… | On September 30, 1987, People's Daily reported: “Since the State Council's strict handling of the catastrophic Great Khingan fire, the Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government have uncovered widespread problems of bureaucratism and organizational indiscipline in provincial departments.” |
| 无论如何,历史前进了,昆山也前进了,只是一个严峻的现实是:昆山比人家慢 了一步。 | Among the fifteen disciplined cadres were those who had spent 11,000 yuan of public funds renovating their own homes, along with the tax bureau's chief and deputy chief, division heads, and section heads who accepted “gifts” from taxpayers—bribes in everything but name. After reading this report, I felt only melancholy. What did any of this have to do with the State Council's handling of the Great Khingan fire? Did these officials really have to wait until the Great Khingan Range lay scorched and ruined before anyone stepped in? And where were the Heilongjiang officials who should have borne responsibility for the great fire? Which bureau? Which office? Which department? Heilongjiang once produced nearly half of the nation's timber, yet its forest area had recently been shrinking at a net annual rate of 1.7 percent. What were the causes? Where do the problems lie? |
| ー步落后,步步脱节。无锡、江阴靠的是下放工人的机遇,张家港、常熟靠的是 插队青年的机遇,而且他们都曾享受过税收上的优惠一这一切,昆山都没有! | Heilongjiang's forests had long been a “forbidden zone,” sealed off by those in power. In such a place, national granaries could be looted, and public property could slip easily into private pockets, with no distinction between right and wrong. As early as the autumn of 1983, signs of a coming catastrophe in the Great Khingan Range were already there. Yet reporters were not allowed in, and writers were not allowed to write. |
| 然而,吴克铃却要上。昆山是顾炎武的家乡,“天下兴亡,匹夫有责”,这有气 节也有气势的名句,昆山无人不知,昆山人更不会自甘落后…… | There was also another report: in the northern city of Harbin, cases of cysticercosis and hookworm had been climbing every year since 1983—from 60 cases to 150 in 1984, then 200 in 1985. These food-borne diseases had appeared suddenly, yet patients could not explain when, where, or how the pathogens entered their bodies. |
| 可是昆山缺资金、缺技术、缺设备、缺人才、缺管理经验。 | The truth eventually emerged: a single handwritten note from a deputy Party secretary in Dehui County had violated national law and authorized the release of 450,000 jin of diseased pork—about 225,000 kilograms. Harbin's food-processing factories turned this pork into canned goods and meat products for the market—poison sold under state labels. |
| “缺”是事实,“上”只是ー个美丽的梦。 | I still could not understand: what kind of pathogen was this? How could it so easily harm the elderly and children? |
| 吴克铃从梦境中醒来面对现实,去找老书记,去找本地的工业行家,还去找满 天飞的采购员 | Then came the Harbin Flax Factory explosion. |
| 渐渐地,他脑子里浮出ー个思路:昆山缺的,东面的邻居上海都有。能不能借 ー下“东风”,能不能和上海攀个亲?当然不是白借,也不是两手空空地巴结。昆 山也有自己的优势:地理位置好,交通方便;土地多、水面多,农副产品开发潜カ大; 劳动カ多,而且廉价。这三个“优”正好是上海的三个“缺”。不是讲“优化组合” 吗?昆山和上海“组合”一下可不可以? | Then the capsizing of a Songhua River ferry. |
| 这里有个很容易被忽略的常识。生活本身就是加减乘除,就看你怎么做或者 怎么“组合”。1+1,可能是2,可能是。,也可能是3或4或其他。“加”得好,可以 有“乘”的效益,反之,则可能是“减”或“除”的结果。 | Then the bombing of the Songhua River railway bridge. |
| 所以,吴克铃反复宣传1+1尹2的道理,作为借“东风”、横向联合的“理论依 据”。早在!983年,他做副县长时,就给县经济发展总公司出点子,在水泥厂搞补 偿贸易,从上海市协作办公室引进了 500万元资金,使水泥厂的生产能力从4万吨 提升到io万吨;同时,又竭カ促成了昆山印刷厂和上海少儿出版社联营建成了全 国第一家儿童印刷厂。当时,他还开玩笑地对分管工业的副县长说:“我把你的权 夺过来了。” | One harsh warning after another—Sun Island was no longer the gentle retreat it had once been. People still loved Sun Island, but now they feared the diseased pork even more. The illness could kill instantly through convulsions, or leave people demented—breathing, yet “living dead.” It could even blind them, their eyes wide open yet seeing nothing. |
| 毕竟是副县长,他还不能完全放开手脚。 | The living dead: blind with open eyes, able to eat and excrete, yet feeling nothing, seeing nothing. Forest fires, explosions, capsized ships—none of it touched them anymore. Soundless, silent—was this not an even deeper sorrow? And was this merely a physical sickness caused by contaminated meat? |
| 现在可以了,他要按照自己的思路借“东风”来设计昆山的经济了。 | In May 1987, the forest fire in China's Great Khingan Range delivered a vast, unmistakable warning to the Chinese people. And yet fire has always been humankind's companion, giving us warmth and cooked food. |
| 二、不准“自由恋爱” | One-point-seven million years ago, our ancestors first encountered fire in the forests—lightning that set trees ablaze. When they discovered that fire could turn raw flesh into cooked food, human civilization made a tremendous leap forward. Under the glow of firelight, new pages of history opened. In a sense, the wheels of civilization were pushed forward by fire. |
| 万事开头难。诸葛亮借东风,靠的是“天意”。吴克铃借“东风”,却只能靠 人为。 | But with fire came its shadows: playing with fire, losing fire, arson, forest fires, the fires of war. And modern warfare's flames have inflicted immeasurable destruction on human beings and on the environments that sustain us. |
| 纺织厂的联营ー开始便是有意识的选择。 | From 1961 to 1970, the United States carried out 20,000 spray missions over one-seventh of South Vietnam's territory, releasing 72 million kilograms of defoliants and destroying 1,400 square kilometers of mangrove forests. Half the hardwood forests north and west of Saigon died. Countless insects, amphibians, and reptiles were poisoned. Rates of stillbirths and birth defects among pregnant women in the region rose sharply. In 1971, after the spraying finally stopped, large bulldozer teams cleared the remaining vegetation, leaving 4.5 million mu—about 300,000 hectares—of exposed land. Over the course of the war, the forests eliminated across Vietnam reached 18 million mu, roughly 1.2 million hectares. |
| 纺织厂是1958年“大跃进”的产物,可惜的是,20多年以后,它仍然破败不已。 有人说它最要好的朋友是税务官,因为它是靠免税オ勉强维持生计的。纺工部ー 个部长看过后说:“没有想到,国内还有这样落后的エ厂。希望抓紧技术改造,但最 好能保留一块,作为纺织エ业的ー个文物……” | How could we not curse war? And yet humanity cannot seem to part from it. When the evening news contains no reports of fighting, people are almost startled—why is there no war today? Flames of conflict everywhere: mountains, fields, forests, gulfs, skies… Humanity is using every possible means to create tragedy, to create deserts. We are not only digging graves for ourselves—we are, with chilling inhumanity, burying our own descendants. |
| 为了使这个“文物”进入现代文明,吴克铃想到了钱一平。这时他在上海担任 经济协作办公室副主任。吴克铃毫无保留地介绍了纺织厂的情况,提出了合作的 | The revelations that emerge after war can be no less profound than war itself. The Korean War in the early 1950s shook the world. Today people focus on the peace proposals of North and South Korea, or on the mutual protests at Panmunjom. But few notice the greatest postwar miracle along the 38th parallel: a 243-kilometer-long, 4-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone that no human has entered for decades—now the largest wildlife sanctuary on earth, dense with thriving forests. |
| 意向。钱一平对吴克铃的想法十分欣赏,两个人越谈越投机,后来吴问:“龚兆源, 龚老,你熟悉不?”钱一平点点头说:“对了,他是你们昆山的地下党党员,他更应该 为建设家乡出力!” | An American reporter described the scene this way: “Here we first saw a pair of red-crowned cranes searching for small fish in the shallow ponds, sometimes spreading their wings, sometimes dancing with elegant steps. They are among the largest flying birds. In 1974, people believed they were extinct—yet here, 170 have been found in and around the demilitarized zone. We also saw flocks of wild geese lifting off from the marshlands in tight formations, soaring and circling. Three eagles drifted lazily above them. Kites, buzzards, small raptors, wild ducks, and countless little birds filled the air. And then—a red-faced crested ibis, its white feathers tinted with pink—an endangered species with only eleven known individuals left in the world…” |
| 乌鲁木齐路,上海市经委顾问龚兆源家中来了两位不速之客。他是个热心人, 离休后在家也没ー天真的清闲过,常有家乡的人来找他办这办那。他看到自己和 妻子杜淑珍还有许多共产党人冒着生命危险为之奋斗的故乡至今没有什么大的变 化,心里总不是滋味;但他又十分清楚,解决点紧缺物资什么的,只能救急而不能救 穷,现在家乡的人来找他,一杯茶喝出了味道!这一回,家乡可以“上路” 了 ! | So good. So beautiful. It felt like a kind of dark green irony—that the very land scarred by war, abandoned by humans, had become a paradise for wildlife. |
| 与此同时,县エ业局的局长也和上海二纺机的厂长严永生联系上了。 | These trees and birds—their ancestors were also victims of war. When humans fought life-and-death battles, no one spared a thought for the forests or their creatures; they were destroyed along with women and children. Such is the reach of hatred. And yet these trees and birds seem now to stand as a quiet reminder: remember war—or perhaps, let yesterday go. |
| 严是个有知识有眼光的企业家,但同时他也清楚现实环境。从一般人的想法 来说,上海和昆山风马牛不相及,双方怎么可能共同去搞ー个企业的?所以他既感 到昆山人能提出这个意向是个大胆的创造,但又怕条条框框紧箍着,即便开了花也 不能结果。所以开头的接触是艰难的。 | Forest researchers told me: any farmland abandoned after being cleared and cultivated—if left untouched—will begin returning to forest within ten years. This is essentially the same phenomenon seen in the uninhabited demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel. |
| 吴克铃心中清楚:这个世界高喊改革,但改革究竟是怎么回事心中都没底。于 是无数改革者只好摸着石头过河。谁也不能保证自己不喝一口水就轻松地到达彼 岸,第一个吃螃蟹的人总是要付出代价的。他说,不管怎么样,还要谈…… | This world should have more “uninhabited zones.” Nature was silently fighting for unattended rights. |
| 再说龚兆源,他和钱一平一起,亲自出马,跑到金山石油化工总厂,请他们提供 切片。石化厂和昆山初次签约时,同意给300吨材料。后来吴克铃把钱一平请到 金山来看。钱一平对这一行熟悉,他说:“老吴,300吨肯定不赚钱!”吴克铃心想, 就是要你说这句话,就问:“那你看怎么办?”钱一平快人快语:“这事你别说,我去 找他们!” | Under sunlight or moonlight, the sound that rises across China is… the sound of illegal logging. |
| 果然,钱一平去找厂长,批评说:“这样搞,怎么能赢利?”对方知道瞒不了他, 就说:“300吨只能’开伙’罢了。”钱一平说:“再给300吨备用设备好不好?”对方 笑了:“钱主任的话,我敢不听?”吴克铃又抓住这个机会提出,再搞300吨零部件 ……就这样,一下子搞了近1000吨！ | In the great cities, skyscrapers and concrete high-rises have sealed people off from one another. Habit has dulled our senses: being far from nature—hearing no birds, seeing no forests—has come to feel normal. The arrival of negative-ion machines made people even more complacent, as if clean air inside a sealed room could replace the real thing. But nature cannot be manufactured; what is manufactured is not nature. |
| 耐人寻味的是,在这个过程中,龚兆源几度“重操旧业”,做起了秘密的“地下 工作”,所不同的是,过去是为了政治上的解放,现在是为了经济上的开放;过去的 斗争对象是腐朽的国民党反动派,现在的“对象”则是我们自己政策中某些保守僵 化的条文。 | Children feel this truth instinctively. Their eyes are full of longing. On a two-square-meter balcony, they search the sky in loneliness, hoping that the few stunted trees between buildings might offer a trace of green. They scatter rice on the balcony rail, waiting for sparrows—believing, perhaps, that sparrows are the last beautiful birds in the world. |
| 终于,由吴克铃和龚兆源在龚老家中秘密磋商、逐字推敲修改的协议,被拿到 谈判桌上半公开地进行讨论了。 | Arbor Day brings a brief moment of joy, then disappears. Few people care whether the saplings survive—so only a third do. As long as people plant trees merely to fulfill a task, without seeing their own lives as bound to the trees' lives, the distance between humans and forests cannot be bridged. |
| 1981年12月21日,上海二纺机厂、上海石油化工总厂涤纶ー厂和昆山工业二 局正式草签了一份叫作《关于协作建设纺丝机实验エ场的协议》。 | Television showed an even stranger sight: on Arbor Day, many people did not plant trees at all—they only posed for photographs. Dozens of cameras aimed at a single sapling. Crowds trampled the loose soil around its roots. People seemed far more interested in appearing on camera, or photographing others, than in giving a tree a chance to live. |
| 不知读者有没有注意到,这里面的字眼是极为考究的。首先是“协作”,ー个 宽泛的、笼统的概念,谁都可以接受;接着,是“实验エ场”,是“实验”,不仅是原则 性的,而且冠冕堂皇;又曰“エ场”,不是エ厂,是小工场小作坊,一点也不引人注 目；最后,是“协议”,谦虚且得体,够谨慎的! | Perhaps on Arbor Day, or on some spring day just after, when nature once again delivers its yearly gift of fresh green, we suddenly realize that the simple expectations of spring—the softness sung in old songs—have faded. Walking through forests the way spring wind once did, or hearing Beethoven's intimate conversations with each leaf and small bird in the woods outside Vienna—these belong to a distant past. |
| 然而,就是这样ー份至今仍被人细心保存着的协议,在当时还是关关受阻,寸 步难行 | Most Chinese people do not know Beethoven, nor his famous line: “I love a tree more than a man.” In his darkest moments, simply thinking of trees and fields rekindled his will to live. His pastoral melodies carry hope through every note. |
| 跑到苏州,苏州回答:上海是省级市,我批昆山县的企业可以,上海一方,我哪 有权批? | And what has taken their place? |
| 到南京,南京答复:江苏还没有跨省市协作办エ厂（工场就是エ厂,这个“阴 谋”被戳穿了）的先例,你和上海一起搞,那你就到上海去批吧! | Whether under sunlight or moonlight, if you hold your breath and listen quietly, you will hear the sound of trees being felled across China. It is this ruthless, cold, grasping destruction that fuels a vicious ecological cycle: the poorer the region, the more mountains are stripped; the more mountains are stripped, the poorer it becomes. The poorer we grow, the more trees we cut—and the more trees we cut, the poorer we grow. |
| 到上海,上海答复:好哇,上海人不为上海办事,你跑到江苏去办什么“工场”？ 还有,我上海怎么好批你江苏的企业呢?即便批了,我也拿不到（部里的）计划。 | In March 1987, the state forest farms of Nandan County in Guangxi were stripped bare. Tree stumps—some more than a meter high—still bear the scars of axes, desolation stretching as far as the eye can see. Who could imagine that this wasteland was once a vast forest of 190,000 mu (about 12,700 hectares)? |
| 这就像是自由恋爱,各自看中了,却没有地方领“结婚证” 〇 | Since 1984, villagers had organized themselves to plunder the forest farm's timber. At Landietang, Malaomen, and other sites, roughly 1,000 mu (about 67 hectares) of mature forest was completely cleared. People then cut another 400 mu (about 27 hectares) at places such as Baliapo. During the 1987 Spring Festival, the timber on 150 mu (about 10 hectares) at Changwan Station came crashing down with explosive force. Some found cutting and hauling too tiring, so they simply helped themselves to piles of timber already felled by the state according to plan. |
| 当时有句话说:“不准东张西望。” | In just two years, a forest farm authorized to log 10,000 cubic meters annually was illegally stripped of 15,000 cubic meters, worth more than 4 million yuan. |
| 吴克铃是个经济型人才,搞经济不可能离开市场,所以不可能不“东张西望” 〇 小小一个昆山,无论如何不可能孤立地存在和前进。 | No wonder so many “ten-thousand-yuan households” appeared there. |
| 他说,上海不行,南京不行,我们跑跑北京好不好?于是他们多次北上,到纺织 工业部找处长、找司长、找部长 | They became rich easily—simply by daring to steal and plunder. |
| 现在说来有些不可想象:从签订协议到批准项目,经过了整整两年的时间! | But the more ten-thousand-yuan households there were, the fewer forests Nandan County had left. |
| 就在这个项目开始实施的时候,吴克铃担任了县长。也正是纺织厂,还有儿童 印刷厂、水泥厂的实践,使他逐步形成了一个概念,找到了一种依托,寻思出来一条 符合昆山实际的发展经济的路子。于是,他规划了一个梦一般的蓝图一 | In April, less than a month after the Shankou Forest Farm in Guangxi was looted, many villages in Liping County, Guizhou, were already stacked high with timber. In Deshun Village alone, the 33 households of a single production group had more than 1,000 cubic meters of timber piled at their doorsteps. Along the roads near Nanzhu Forest Farm, unlicensed timber stretched for a full kilometer, totaling more than 10,000 cubic meters. All of it cut from state forests—yet instantly transformed not into public property, but into private assets for those who had grown rich, and for those who soon would: the ten-thousand-yuan households. |
| 昆山要上14个500万元以上的重点项目,总投资1.5亿元。 | It all happened effortlessly. In Hongzhou District, officials claimed they were “updating” state forests and petitioned the county government for permission to cut timber in Motianding State Forest Farm. The county approved 500 cubic meters, subcontracting the quota to five individuals. Those five cut 993 cubic meters—nearly double the quota—which immediately triggered mass looting. “Get rich together or stay poor together,” people said, and soon the entire community was climbing the mountains to cut trees. Chinese people are often cautious, sober, even hesitant when defending justice—but utterly fearless when destroying for personal gain. The result: Motianding's 3,000 mu (about 200 hectares)—a forest of towering tree pillars—was annihilated overnight. |
| 国务院批准了 !4个沿海经济开发区,昆山不是开发区,但要上14个重点 项目。 | In one county, the Shuikou District Forest Farm covered 5,700 mu (about 380 hectares). In 1985, management was handed over to Shuikou Town. Lacking funds for new government offices, the town requested county approval to cut 200 cubic meters of timber. The county agreed; the office building and the timber revenue, 50,000 yuan, both vanished without a trace. |
| 这是真的吗? | Town leaders then led the way in cutting trees to build their own homes. The masses followed. Illegal logging continued; daytime was not enough, so they cut at night. Of the forest farm's 5,700 mu, a full 80 percent was brutally destroyed. |
| 真的。 | Near the county seat, the state-owned Huapo Forest Farm, built with more than 2 million yuan of state investment, covered 63,000 mu (about 4,200 hectares) of forest. Yet right under the noses of the county committee and county government, the pillaging of timber by cadres and villagers had become routine. Investigations confirmed that more than 20,000 mu (about 1,330 hectares) of forest had been cut, stolen, looted, or destroyed. |
| 三、“吃大亏者”言 | Could the county's magistrates truly sit still? In case after case, large-scale logging in state forests had first received the county government's approval—and then, inevitably, spiraled out of control, leaving vast stretches of forest cut to the ground. Even more astonishing, in 1986 alone, the amount of timber felled under written approvals from county leaders exceeded 100,000 cubic meters. |
| 我们的人民从来不拒绝改革,但对改革又往往存有一种矛盾的心理。中国是 ー个农业大国,农业人口多。聪明和愚昧、勤劳和懒散、伟大和渺小……这些都相 伴相生着。把握住这一点是ー门艺术。只看一面,非左即右,或太快或太慢。其实 中国的事情是不可不急,不可太急,不可不改革,也不能“ 一步到位”,一口吃出个 胖子来。 | These “written approvals” are a uniquely Chinese phenomenon: a single sentence from a person in power, a slip of paper no larger than a palm, a few crooked characters; yet their force outweighs countless laws, decrees, notices, and proclamations. From the release of 450,000 jin of diseased pork in Dehui County, Heilongjiang, to the 100,000-plus cubic meters of illicit timber in Liping County, Guizhou, the pattern is the same. What exhausts and angers the public is this: in the old feudal era, one county magistrate handled many affairs. Even if he issued dubious approvals, he was still only one person. Today, a county has no fewer than ten deputy Party secretaries and deputy magistrates. No wonder these slips of paper have grown so terribly heavy. |
| 昆山人也是矛盾的,既羡慕大上海的繁华,又嫉妒他们的“阔绰”一“高工 资”的上海“阿拉”到昆山喜欢到市场“抢购”,有时会不问价钱只说一句“我全 要了!” | Naturally, in such places, even though the Forest Law and the Implementation Rules of the Forest Law have been in force for years, violators and offenders rarely face serious punishment. When those above are crooked, those below simply follow their lead. |
| 现在吴克铃却要依托上海的优势来发展昆山的经济ーー和“阿拉”结为好友, 把“阿拉”们ー批ー批地请到昆山来待为座上宾! | Wherever there is a forest farm, there is money to be made—and the main levers are power and profit. In Liping County, logging permits were controlled by the county, the district, the township, and the town governments. Regulations required a processing fee of only 0.50 yuan per permit, but some township authorities imposed “fees” of 15 to 30 yuan per cubic meter of timber cut. Others seized the opportunity to sell logging permits outright, forge official seals, forge transport documents, and collude inside and out to profit from the forest. |
| 于是有些人就表现出ー种情绪,说上海人太精,和他们打交道要吃亏。 | Thus the forests were besieged from all sides. One single word—”money”—created such disorder in society and in people's lives. Today some have grown rich; tomorrow they will face barren hills and empty wastelands. In the long run, they will be far poorer than before. |
| 吴克铃说,吃亏不吃亏,就如怕上海人来了会抬高物价ー样,这笔账,看你怎 么算。 | Anxi County in Fujian is famous for producing Tieguanyin tea. In recent years, as Tieguanyin prices soared and sales boomed, many grew wealthy. Forests paid the price; clearing land and cutting trees to plant more tea became fashionable. In just three to five years, soil erosion became visibly severe. If this trend continues—if the unique environment and climate of Anxi's high-mountain bamboo groves are lost—its farmland will be ruined, its trees gone, its tea gardens destined to decline. How will the mountain people survive then? What will their descendants rely on? Perhaps only the advertisements now plastered across every Tieguanyin tea box will remain: |
| 其实,首先感到“吃亏”的不是昆山而是上海。 | “Anxi Tieguanyin is China's finest oolong tea. The bamboo gardens of Anxi's high mountains enjoy rare climatic conditions. Its traditional picking and processing techniques have a long history. Tieguanyin is famed worldwide for its fragrance, mellow sweetness, and unique flavor. After drinking, it leaves a pleasant aftertaste, dispels heat, aids digestion and urination, sterilizes and heals, refreshes and sobers, reduces fat and blood pressure, prevents tooth decay, resists radiation, and even prevents cancer—it is the ideal beverage for the atomic age.” |
| 说ー个很有一些传奇色彩的小故事。 | This entire advertisement was copied from an actual Tieguanyin package. Its global reputation is real; its medicinal claims are… absolute. I do not dare doubt them. But reading such claims, I cannot help feeling a deep, uneasy emotion: How will posterity judge us? How will history taste this moment? |
| 一次,吴克铃到北京去,拜访国务院副秘书长顾明。顾明是昆山人,一来二去 就熟悉了。顾明很看重吴克铃清醒独特的经济思路和务实精神,那一回还亲自送 他到飞机场。就在机场候机室,顾明提到,上海金星电视机厂引进设备他出了不少 カ。言者无意,听者有心。吴克铃马上接过话说:“秘书长能不能写个便条,我去上 海找他们认识ー下,有可能的话,在我们昆山办个分厂。”顾明热心,当即就在北京 飞机场的候机室里写了封信让吴克铃带着去找金星电视机厂的一个柯厂长。 | Fujian's forestry departments are equally troubled by another crisis: the mass cutting of broad-leaved trees to cultivate edible fungi—tremella, shiitake, and others. To make quick money, people sacrifice the forests that should benefit both present and future generations. It is chilling. |
| 好事多磨。厂长态度很积极,却有人认为大厂和小县联营是降低身份,要吃大 亏。但他们又碍于顾明的面子,不好明确拒绝。吴克铃并不灰心,ー连跑了四五趟 上海,反反复复,后来オ勉强有了个协议。好在柯厂长看得远,他认为扩大生产势 在必行,而昆山最具建分厂的条件,他力排众议,不改初衷。 | Gutian County is known for its white fungus. After consuming enormous amounts of forest resources, the entire county now has only 180,000 cubic meters of broad-leaved timber left. The old trees are nearly gone; this year they began cutting the young ones. In Minhou County, three townships alone cut more than 20,000 cubic meters of timber in 1986 to produce edible fungi. |
| 最后一次,吴克铃在他的小会议室里为协议的草签一直商量到夜里11点 多钟。 | Why are edible fungi so popular? Short cycles, low investment, high returns. Many poor townships made fungus cultivation their primary means of poverty alleviation. And poor townships tend to have little forest and thin soil. So once their own trees were gone, they began buying—or stealing—from neighboring counties. |
| 上海方面理顺了,昆山自己又感到“吃亏”了。 | In 1986, Fujian consumed 1.38 million cubic meters of broad-leaved timber for edible-fungus production. The province's total stock of broad-leaved forest has now fallen sharply to 130 million cubic meters. Broad-leaved species are hard to replant, harder to grow into forests, and require long cycles to mature. Experts have already issued warnings: Fujian's broad-leaved forests will soon be exhausted. |
| 吴克铃却开宗明义,公开宣称:就是要让投资者赚钱! | Are we still gnawing our ancestors' bones and eating our descendants' seeds? No one denies that Tieguanyin tea and white fungus, after consuming vast stretches of forest, helped some farmers escape poverty. But the price was steep: bleeding hillsides and barren fields spreading for miles. |
| ー个简单得不能再简单的道理,没有好处,上海跑到你昆山来干什么? | Nor are the cities innocent. Whether for beautifying urban landscapes or simply to make money, people have rushed into the mountains. Reports note that in Xining, Qinghai—part of China's “Three North” region—more than twenty species of evergreens, flowers, and shrubs were uprooted from the Liupan and Helan Mountains and transplanted into the city. Over 140,000 wild plants were taken, including Qinghai spruce. Yet the “Three North” region has the lowest forest coverage in the country, just 5.9 percent. When valuable wild plants are dug out on a large scale—whether for city decoration or to create expensive bonsai—the more prized and beautiful they are, the faster they are destroyed. In recent years, wild populations of rare ornamental plants—cycads, camellias, azaleas, orchids, lilies—have plummeted, some nearly to extinction. |
| 推而广之,一切横向的联营,所有国内外的投资者,都是冲着有钱可赚、有利可 图来的。 | On Changmen Rock Island, twenty kilometers off the Laoshan coast, the last wild camellias of northern China now face oblivion. These ancient evergreen trees bloom from winter into spring, sometimes for half a year. Pu Songling's famous tale of the camellia spirit descending like snow from Taiqing Palace is known around the world. Taiqing Palace sits in Laoshan; the camellias in his story were wild blossoms from Changmen Rock. Locals long regarded them as fairy flowers. In the past, wild camellias covered most of the island. Today, they are extinct on the Laoshan mainland, and only 549 trees survive on Changmen Rock—already in decline. These primitive plants, notoriously difficult to cultivate or protect, were destroyed with shocking ease: fishermen and flower dealers snapped off flowers, dug out trees, gathered seeds, and pried up seedlings. Nothing was spared. In less than three years, along with a beautiful legend, we may lose the camellias themselves. |
| 只想自己赚,只考虑自己的好处;对方只可“奉献”,只有“义务”,ー看人家有 赚头或赚多一点就眼红,就咬紧牙关憋足了劲死不肯签约,表面上看这是“精”,是 | Human beings still fail to grasp a simple truth: when we push forests and wild plants toward disaster, we ultimately threaten ourselves. We must free ourselves from selfishness and learn to live alongside forests. When a tree or a blade of grass is treated with care, it returns that care in its own way. A small example puzzled many of us: |
| “聪明”,是“原则性强”,实质上,这倒是最狭隘、最可怜、最没出息的小家子气,说 到底,也是真正的吃亏者。 | Wild plants carefully dug from the mountains, tended on balconies, fertilized and watered with devotion—still withered away. |
| 这个重点项目差一点就泡汤,成为ー个梦。 | Two years ago, an American botanist conducted an experiment: someone deliberately damaged a plant in front of another plant of the same species. Later, when a group of people walked past the surviving plant, instruments recorded a reaction only when the “killer” approached—its own kind had sent a distress signal. |
| 建分厂,要给上海一次性技术转让费15万元,每生产1台黑白电视机再给商 标费15元。 | Humans cannot claim everything for themselves. Without the occasional, well-timed correction from nature—without the humbling of our arrogance and ignorance—we would destroy ourselves even faster. |
| 有些人就喊“吃亏”,说这是“不平等条约”。 | When we speak casually about “culture” or “civilization,” we often forget one of humanity's oldest measures of civilization: reverence for nature, love for nature, and the care of nature. Parents teach their children to treasure every penny, yet rarely to treasure every blade of grass. We confine our hearts to small, narrow worlds instead of allowing our imaginations to stretch outward. We rightly teach children to care for the elderly—but why, then, can we not also care for old trees? |
| 吴克铃说,技术就是金钱,人家的技术凭什么要无偿送给你昆山?昆山自己生 产的电视机用自己的商标拿出去卖,人家买你昆山牌的还是买上海金星牌的?就 是多花50块100块也还是要买金星的……这就是竞争。金星的牌子打出来了,名 牌本身就是金钱! | In the spring of 1979, I traveled to Hainan Island. The scenery was beautiful, the greenery abundant—that much goes without saying. But as I approached Wuzhi Mountain, I was stopped by a wall of smoke. I learned that the mountain people were burning the hillsides. From the Spring Festival until May, slash-and-burn was in full season. |
| 竞争是平等的。之所以感到不平等,是因为还不知道什么叫作竞争。 | I walked deeper into the smoke. The haze shifted between thick and thin, sometimes near, sometimes drifting far into the trees. In the glow of the flames, trees large and small were swallowed first by smoke, then blackened like charcoal. The small ones withered quickly and fell. The larger trees—dead but still standing—would later need to be chopped down. |
| 从本质上说,只有竞争オ有平等。有多少竞争就有多少平等,没有竞争就没有 平等。 | In May 1986, friends returning from Hainan told me the same slash-and-burn practices continued. What they saw matched what I had witnessed, but they were even more troubled by the surge of illegal logging. Slash-and-burn had been a survival practice of the local people—especially the Li and Miao minorities—for thousands of years. They burned the mountains to plant grain and live. But illegal loggers were different: they came for profit, caring nothing for the value of rare trees, stealing everything they could. |
| 自然界如此,社会上也ー样。 | We discussed Hainan—a region closed off and undeveloped, but with extraordinarily rich natural resources. Those green expanses were precious treasures. Since the founding of the Republic, in addition to its natural forests, Hainan had planted vast protective belts of casuarina and acacia to shield the island from wind and sand—its first line of defense for the island's ecosystem. Hainan's blue seas, green trees, and beautiful flowers all depended on these protective forests. Yet, unbelievably, Hainan's green was disappearing. What would this mean? |
| 商品（产品）的竞争是血淋淋的。这里没有温情,没有谦让,也不讲“主义”,它 只有一句话:优胜劣汰,不叫你死我活,至少也可以说是你上我下。 | Baoting County lies at the southern foot of Wuzhi Mountain—long hours of sun, high temperatures, lush vegetation. At the founding of the Republic, Baoting had more than 1.12 million mu of tropical natural forest (about 75,000 hectares) with 41 percent forest coverage. By the 1960s, reckless logging had already cut that nearly in half, leaving 690,000 mu (about 46,000 hectares) and reducing forest coverage to 25 percent. As the years slipped by, the numbers continued to fall. |
| 什么叫作吃亏?跳出谈判双方,看全局,看大局,生产发展了,经济上去了,全 社会都有好处,谈不上谁吃亏。 | And with this downward trend came consequences. |
| 有时候,在某个特定的情况下,“不平等条约”体现的倒是真平等、大平等! | Statistics from the county made one point unmistakably clear: when forests are destroyed, nature never shows mercy. On the contrary—its revenge is swift. |
| 干大事业者不仅能吃小亏,还要敢于吃大亏! | The elders of Baoting County all said the same thing: the weather had changed, the climate had changed, and the rains had grown scarce. In the 1950s, Baoting's average rainfall during winter and spring was 433.6 millimeters; in the 1960s, it fell to 389.6 millimeters; by the 1970s, it had dropped to just 319.7 millimeters. With less rain came fewer fogs and foggy days—102 days in the 1950s, 81 in the 1960s, and only 77 in the 1970s. This decline was the primary reason for rising temperatures and worsening drought. |
| 就是说,要在“不平等”里看到平等,要在“吃亏”里面看到便宜。 | Baoting's tropical forests once stood like a shield, breaking the force of repeated storms and protecting the county's mountains and rivers. In the 1960s, the average wind speed in Baoting was only 0.9 meters per second; in the 1970s, it rose to 1.4 meters per second. When Typhoon No. 5 struck Hainan in 1981, most of the forests that had once formed a natural defensive wall had already been destroyed. The winds tore through the remaining stands and in an instant flattened half of Baoting County's rubber plantations. Rubber trees bring profit—but how can profit withstand the force of a typhoon? |
| 不然,怎么可能做到起步晚而起点高? | A single mu of forest can hold 20 cubic meters more water than land without forest. Destroy the forest, and you destroy the water source. In the 1950s, Chunlei Hydroelectric Station produced 2,500 kilowatts of electricity; now it produces only 1,000—not because its equipment has aged, but because the water has disappeared. In the 1950s, the county had more than 10,000 mu of farmland irrigated by natural water; by the 1980s, only 1,000 mu remained. |
| 吴克铃的胆识、眼力、干大事业的大将风度,ー开始就咄咄逼人,并且始终表现 出ー种不同凡响的既超前又实在的意识。 | After the forests are felled, we face crises of our own making: deserts, storms, drought, thirst. Some people have already tasted the bitterness; others soon will. |
| 四、孤独的父母官 | Calls to “develop Hainan Island” have been constant. There is much that can be done on this treasure island. But the most urgent task is clear: protect the forests, plant as many new trees as possible, and only then pursue other forms of development. |
| 14个重点项目在全县城乡铺开了,那声音、那阵势、那气氛、那劲头,真有些像 南泥湾大生产,又有些像20世纪50年代的“合作化”。 | Protecting Hainan's tropical forests has become an emergency. Illegal logging and arson must stop. |
| 这是一片波滚浪翻、喧腾咆哮的土地,几天之前,还是沟渠纵横、青黄相间的田 野,现在它已经成为金星电视机厂昆山分厂的基建工地。 | It is no exaggeration to say that the sound of axes—under sunlight or moonlight—echoes across every corner of China. Our own compatriots are hacking away at the nation's lifelines—its living flesh and blood. In that sense, China is a country that bleeds a little more every day. |
| 吴克铃站在这片新旧交替的土地上,脸上露出ー种创造者的笑容。然而,总是 有人不高兴,总是有人不理解,当改革开放后第一次宏观控制的旋风刮下来的时 候,金星电视机厂昆山分厂的筹建工作很快陷入困境,于是矛盾的焦点又一次集中 到吴克铃身上。 | Let us move from Hainan to Xinjiang—from islands to deserts and oases. Let us stop romanticizing deserts. They are not mystical landscapes but barren lands born from deforestation and exhaustion. And the camel caravans—who would truly want to be reborn as a camel, trudging along a new Silk Road? |
| 一下子铺那么多摊子,是不是好大喜功?是不是头脑发热? | Xinjiang also has oases. The Hami melons we eat do not grow in deserts but in these green enclaves protected by shelterbelts. Xinjiang, Qinghai, and similar regions stand on the front lines of humanity's struggle against desertification, where the damage is most immediate. Yet even in these fragile lands, the poplar groves, valley forests, and the tough, low red willows, saxauls, and other desert shrubs—plants that should be valued like life itself—are at risk. These tenacious trees stand year after year, holding back the sands, preserving a thin margin of peace for the people. And yet they face relentless cutting. |
| 好社会主义之“大”,喜改革开放之“功”,这一点,他不否认。他始终觉得,作 为ー个共产党员,他欠人民的太多太多,只要有机会,他就要为人民建功立业,做出 最大的奉献。从这个意义上说,好大喜功的人不是多了而是少了,太少了。 | According to a report in Xinjiang Daily on May 12, 1986, more than 1,200 horse- and donkey-carts in Awati County hauled firewood out of the poplar forests every day. In the Hotan region, more than 200 brick and lime kilns burned wood as fuel, consuming over 10 million kilograms of poplar and red willow each year. At roughly 5,000 kilograms of firewood per mu, these kilns alone destroyed 2,000 mu of forest annually. |
| 头脑发热?他觉得有些好笑。1947年他15岁就到银行做练习生,共和国成立 后始终在经济战线上南征北战,从无锡到上海,从广州到武汉,从国家计委到河西 走廊再到五七干校的窑厂……正面的反面的、酸的甜的、苦的辣的,一切的一切都 告诉他:无论如何都不能再搞政治运动,无论如何都不能再用搞政治运动的那ー套 来搞经济建设。正是在把握这个基本点的前提下,他苦苦地寻觅出“东张西望”、 横向联合的路子,在充分调查论证的基础上オ确定了 14个重点建设项目。 | Some regions of Xinjiang now face a triple crisis: farmland turning to desert, grasslands collapsing, and the advance of sand driving people back. The deserts are moving forward. |
| 他是县长是父母官,然而他也是ー个人,他不可能没有自己的想法、自己的顾 虑,也不可能没有他的苦闷、他的孤独与彷徨! | On the morning of April 7, 1987, the village committee of Saishike in Shike Township, Wulan County, Qinghai, made a shocking decision: it mobilized villagers to cut down the poplar trees in the northern shelterbelt. More than seventy young and middle-aged people, carrying axes and pickaxes, rolled up their sleeves and began chopping. This usually quiet village suddenly echoed with the sound of falling trees. By the time the township Party secretary rushed over and stopped the operation, 208 poplars had already been felled, and more than 100 meters of the protective forest belt had been destroyed—one hundred meters of shelterbelt erased in a single day. |
| 白夜。黑昼。世界的迷离混沌和颠倒反差无情地扰乱了他的思绪。他居然找 不到ー个说话的地方,当然只是ー个很短暂的过程。他生出来ー种少有的孤独感。 这使他在家里不开心,影响了妻子的情绪,在外面也不开心,有时竟会莫名其妙地 激动得脸红脖子粗。好在家里的、外面的,做官的、做老百姓的,一般也了解他的为 人,理解他的艰难处境,所以谁也不会计较他。越是这样,他越是感到忧心如焚,苦 闷无比。他真想飞到北京去,和中南海的决策者们做一番理论。 | My most unforgettable experience, however, was a trip through the Three Gorges. |
| 唉!也只能是想想,中国的改革开放还没有到ー个七品芝麻官可以随时和总 书记直接对话的地步。 | Everyone knows the Three Gorges are dramatic and beautiful, and that the Yangtze River is vast and ancient. Li Bai once wrote, “The gibbons cry unbroken from both banks”—yet now there are no gibbons to be seen, and no cries to be heard. As for Du Fu's lament, “Boundless leaves fall, rustling down,” even the fallen leaves are gone; the ridgelines on both sides are rocky and bare, with only scattered shrubs. Poetry allows exaggeration, but geography does not lie. The Three Gorges connect the fertile Bashu lands upstream with the fish-and-rice regions downstream. According to historical records, their banks were once covered in dense forest, rich vegetation, and hundreds of species of wildlife. |
| 那么,和最基层的厂长书记们对话总可以吧? | Only in modern times, through reckless logging and indiscriminate land reclamation, has the ecological environment of the Three Gorges deteriorated with such speed. From the 1950s to the 1980s, forest areas in the counties along the Gorges were cut nearly in half. Fengjie County's forest coverage fell from 32.3 percent to 17.4 percent; Wushan County's from 24.6 percent to 11.7 percent. As forests disappeared, wildlife lost its habitat. Coupled with excessive hunting, populations of rare species—sika deer, white cranes, swans, golden eagles—declined sharply. Clouded leopards and golden monkeys were now seen only rarely, deep in the remote mountains. The South China tiger was almost extinct. |
| 阳澄湖畔的巴城镇,古镇旁边正在崛起一个新厂。这是全县14个重点项目之 ー。厂长名叫陆大荣,曾经因为2000元的“经济问题”吃过官司。党委书记和镇长 跑到人事局找方局长,又跑到组织部找沈部长,在分析了陆大荣的历史后提出:此 人可不可转干?可不可当厂长?可以。又问:可以当一个投资1400万元的大厂的 厂长吗?也可以。像这样的人还可以入党吗?根据你说的,当然可以。 | Most farmers cultivated steep mountainsides cleared from forest. Soil erosion worsened year after year, fertility plummeted, and grain yields dropped to only 100–200 jin per mu (about 75–150 kilograms per hectare). In eastern Sichuan and western Hubei, per-capita grain output was 600 jin (roughly 300 kilograms per person) one-third below the national average. |
| 就是这个陆大荣,用拼命三郎的精神创造了“巴城速度”：十天一层楼;工程保 质保量保速度了,每上一层楼他就扛了一头杀好的猪送到工地犒赏“三军”！ | Upstream of the Gorges, Wanxian alone had more than 6,000 mu (about 400 hectares) of completely eroded, barren land; devastation of this scale was rarely seen or heard of. The Three Gorges were, at the same time, rich and poor—magnificent yet disfigured. Their wealth and beauty lay in the singular harmony of mountains and water, a natural “corridor of landscape paintings.” Their poverty and ugliness originated in the destruction of forests: soil stripped away, land thinned to exhaustion, and governance either lax or absent. |
| 吴克铃来到工地上,明显地感受到了一种气氛,ー种从群众内心深处诱发出来 的巨大的积极性。 | The towns of the Three Gorges once nestled against the mountains and along the riverbanks, dotting the edges of the Yangtze and its tributaries. Today, the mountain-city charm that should have flourished is almost nowhere to be found. Disorder and garbage are everywhere; decent green spaces and street trees are rare. |
| 我们的人民永远是可爱的。 | Shops, vendors, pedestrians, and vehicles of every size crowd together along narrow, filthy streets—noise levels rivaling Beijing or Shanghai. Industrial wastewater is dumped directly into the river, untreated; town garbage is simply tipped over the bank into the Yangtze. The Yangtze may be China's lifeline, but it has also become China's largest flowing garbage dump—yet today even this garbage hardly flows. Some of the huge conical piles cannot be washed away even in the flood season. |
| 人民迫切希望改变现状,他们欢迎并无条件地参加一切改革,只要这个改革能 够给他们希望,给他们带来好处。 | Added to this is the endless sediment washing down from mountains stripped of vegetation. Measurements from Yichang show that for years the upper Yangtze has carried an average of 530 million tons of sediment annually. In the Three Gorges region alone, sediment yield reaches 1,000 tons per square kilometer. The fertile soil of the motherland is being swept, torrent by torrent, into the eastern seas. |
| 吴克铃问陆大荣:“你这速度是不是’太快’了?” | The Three Gorges are also one of the most active landslide zones along the Yangtze. In recent years landslides have struck repeatedly—the Jipazi slide in Yunyang, the massive Xintan slide of more than 1,000 cubic meters, and the still-active Huanglashi and Lianziya slides. Nearly all occurred where forests had been destroyed and no vegetation remained. Quarrying and mining, carved deep into the mountains, only accelerated the collapse. People feared the same question: if a landslide's rolling boulders plunged into the Yangtze, what would happen? |
| 答:“要不是下雨,还可再快一点〇” | Yet even as victims of the Wuxi landslide lay struggling in hospital beds, the felling of the Three Gorges' remaining forests resumed. From upstream to downstream, the Yangtze faces a growing population, growing sediment loads, growing volumes of garbage—while the only force that could protect and cradle the river, the forests, grow fewer by the year. |
| 又问:“还有没有什么困难?” | Everything has limits. The Yangtze's capacity to carry and cleanse is finite. Without urgent intervention, the Yangtze will, inevitably, become a second Yellow River. The riverbanks should have been lined with well-tended shelterbelts; where trees could not grow, grasses should have been planted—any grasses at all, anything green that could hold the soil in place. |
| 答:“困难是有的,但同县里的比,就算不上什么了 一我们别的不能做什么, 千方百计把这个项目建成,尽快见效就算是对县委县政府的ー种支持……” | The reed marshes along the Yangtze—especially the great reedbeds on the lower-river mudflats—were once a distinctive sight. Reeds are not strong plants, but they resist wind and water with remarkable resilience. Their roots weave tightly together, and they grow at astonishing speed. I spent an imaginative though impoverished childhood playing among the reeds. Now I am told that since reclamation began twenty years ago—and since reeds gained new economic value—the reeds have become scarce, and the vast marshes nearly impossible to find. |
| 吴克铃紧握住陆大荣的手,说:“谢谢!” | I could not help remembering the reed-leaf boats of my childhood—the tiny green boats that carried my earliest imagination. Would they still belong to the children of today's and tomorrow's Jiangnan water towns? |
| 谢谢全县50万人民,谢谢全县上千名厂长、书记…… | Not long after I walked out of the forests of Fujian and Zhejiang and began drafting this reportage in Shanghai, Liberation Daily published an article on October 11, 1986, warning that the agricultural ecological environment of the Shanghai economic zone was deteriorating at an alarming rate. |
| 五、“老吴要高速度” | This decline was visible across the entire country—driven by excessive demands on nature, which led to shortages of natural resources, soil erosion, shrinking farmland, and falling forest coverage. But the Shanghai economic zone faced additional problems even more acute than elsewhere: pollution from township enterprises encroaching on rural green spaces and rapid expansion of urban construction eating into farmland. |
| 不思量,自难忘,平生坎坷多少事,总把真情相向! | Jiangsu Province had only 1.1 mu of farmland per capita (about 0.073 hectares), the lowest in the nation—yet land requisition for infrastructure continued to accelerate, causing the province to lose 0.8 percent of its farmland every year. In 1985 alone, Nanjing lost 2,680 hectares of farmland, with 371 hectares swallowed by new housing. If farmland continues to shrink at this pace, Nanjing will have none left in a century. Alas—on this ancient land of Jinling, outside the old Stone City walls, how will future generations survive? |
| 吴克铃从内心里感谢并永远记住那些在困难时候给予自己理解和支持的所有 的人。 | A few days later, Xinmin Evening News reported that several street trees in Shanghai had died due to insufficient protection. That brief note made me look more closely at Shanghai's trees. Their branches were sparse, their leaves thin. On this land, even a modest amount of green in spring and summer seemed hard-won; how could the waters of the Suzhou River and the Huangpu River nourish deep roots and generous foliage? |
| 14个重点项目,他ー个ー个跑过来,听汇报,看工程,和基层的厂长书记座谈。 他看到的是ー批实实在在的奋斗者的足迹,感觉到的是ー种抓住了机会就拼命改 变现状的热烈气氛。人民不是用语言而是用行动来称赞改革的。 | But the destruction of trees under sunlight and moonlight extends far beyond this. |
| 人民拥护改革,改革属于人民。 | At dawn in Wuyi Mountain, before tourists even began climbing, someone digging up tree roots had already returned home with a full load. |
| 还有两个人,他要深深地感谢他们。 | And on the square bamboo below Xianyou Peak, knife blades had carved “masterpieces” from tourists across the country—”So-and-so was here”! |
| 苏州市委书记戴心思来了,他也是听到ー些风声后跑来的。 | Beyond the disgust, I found myself thinking: if we provided more guestbooks to satisfy people's urge to leave their mark, perhaps fewer names would be carved into bamboo, trees, and ancient architecture. |
| 平时都很忙,开会了,书记又要照应到各个县市,不可能只听你ー个昆山的县 长说。 | Wuyi Mountain's Yunwo—the legendary cave where Li Shangyin once studied—still had a bamboo shoot growing from a crack in the stone. It rose straight upward, then angled out from the cave mouth, twisting its way until it finally reached the open sky. Friends told me that another bamboo had grown nearby that spring, even more remarkable: it curled once around a rock before standing upright in perfect grace. One night, that miraculous young bamboo was cut down by illegal loggers. |
| 现在可以了。 | Beneath Yunwo lies a cave said to be the place where clouds and mist gather. In the past, no one could see how deep it went. Now that the clouds have thinned and the fog has cleared, everything at the bottom is visible—waste paper, bottles, and even human excrement. |
| 先看,先问,边看边问,然后,在第一招待所,他听吴克铃的汇报。 | At Mount Tai, the morning incense-burners are often elderly women with Taishan pine sprigs tucked into their hair, some carrying small bundles. When the evening glow fades and they descend the mountain, the pine sprigs have turned into mountain flowers picked from the Jade Emperor Peak—just a few, held joyfully as they begin their journey home. But Taishan pines are already few in number; how long can they bear such treatment? |
| 吴克铃还是第一次比较系统地向市委领导汇报自己的经济思路。 | At Yandang Mountain, I once watched several couples picking flowers and grasses all the way from the foot of the mountain to the summit. Romance and flowers may be inseparable, but flowers picked from the soil wither quickly. The couples simply tossed the dead ones aside and picked fresh ones. To treat such delicate lives in nature with this kind of carelessness—was it not too cruel? |
| 戴心思听得极为认真。在大的原则问题上,他是从来不轻易表态的,但这ー 次,他却十分明确地说:“看起来,照你这个路子走下去,昆山有希望。” | Years ago, I saw Huangshan's Welcoming Pine already tied and propped up, its survival precarious. Recently I heard its trunk had to be wrapped in protective iron plates—nature forced to face humanity in armor. |
| 市委书记一句话,使吴克铃挺直了腰杆。 | I once read a thrilling report: in 1979, fifty-eight silver fir trees were discovered in Chengbu County, Hunan. These were a uniquely Chinese species—”living fossils” dating back a hundred million years, known as the “giant pandas of the plant world.” The world would surely take notice. And yet, just as many worry when new scenic areas appear on television, discovery often means trampling and destruction—and destruction comes quickly, in countless forms. |
| 然而,由于宏观控制的影响,原定由上海金星厂投资的钱拿不出来了。 | After the discovery, counties immediately began fighting over jurisdiction, eager to claim these national treasures for profit. For six full years, Xinning County and Chengbu Miao Autonomous County battled in court. In 1986, Shaoyang Prefecture ruled that the 8,200 mu of forest around Shajiaodon, where the silver firs stood, would be administered by Chengbu. |
| 这个联营厂就这么半途而废了? | But some people held a cruel creed: if I cannot have it, then you cannot have it; if I cannot live well, then you should not live well either. |
| 多情总被无情恼。多少心血与汗水,到头来全付于一江春水东流去? | A group from Xinning County treated the fifty-eight silver firs as enemies. They hacked at them with axes and knives, destroying wantonly. Once, they mobilized more than 130 people to smash the entire management office of Chengbu's protection zone. Still unsatisfied, they gouged bark and dug holes into nine silver firs. A first-grade nationally protected species—the long-bracted hemlock—was burned and collapsed, crushing a silver fir. Even then they did not stop. They scraped more bark, dug more holes, pulled up wild silver fir seedlings, cut down fruit-bearing branches, and even removed the topsoil beneath the silver firs. |
| 吴克铃不相信,也不甘心。 | They truly intended to wipe them out—root and branch. |
| 没有钱不可以借吗?你不好借,我们出面借行不行? | Did they ever consider that these were national assets—treasures of all humankind? If mountain villagers did not understand this principle, what excuse did the secretaries and officials of Xinning County have? They carried documents stamped with red seals and spoke every day of “serving the people.” Should they not have known the law, studied it, and obeyed it? What exactly were they doing? |
| 吴克铃立刻赶到上海,说明来意:“婚姻”大事,不敢儿戏!联营厂总要办成办 好,资金问题,上海一方的由昆山出面以上海的名义借。 | To display their barbarity and ugliness to the fullest, these people did not stop at the silver firs. Since last July, they had stripped the bark from 150 laurel trees within the protection zone, uprooted 120 mulberry trees, cut down five camphor trees, and even knocked over eight wooden bridges built inside the reserve. Readers can easily imagine how thoroughly the habitat of the national silver firs was ravaged. |
| 古今中外,不知有没有过这种先例。双方恋爱结婚,甲方应出的钱拿不出了, 就由乙方以甲方的名义去借…… | I could not understand it. What is the difference between stealing the heads of the Terracotta Warriors and scraping the bark off a protected silver fir in the wild, a national treasure? Which is a worse crime? Is only the murderer a killer? If crimes committed under broad daylight do not include deeds like these, then the sun itself must be at fault—either its sunspots are too many, or the clouds covering it are too thick. |
| 改革是ー个万花筒。改革时期人民的智慧和创造要比平时大大提升。 | And it must be said plainly: this rampage by the Xinning County group was not spontaneous. It was instigated by certain leaders in the Xinning County Forestry Bureau, complete with specially allotted funds for wages. Before they smashed the weather station in the silver fir protection zone on August 10, 1986, they even issued an “urgent notice” to village groups in Jiefu Village: |
| 心诚则灵,志坚则成。金星电视机厂昆山分厂就这样在一片风雨中建成投 产了! | “By order of the county committee, tomorrow (August 10) at 1:00 p.m. Beijing time, all able-bodied men over the age of 18 are to gather at Wang Youqun's house. Bring vegetable knives, hammers, and steel picks. Do not worry about wages…” |
| 14个重点项目在克服难以想象的困难中又以难以想象的速度筹建、生产、 发展。 | The people who organized and directed this destruction were in positions of authority. If the law had truly been enforced, how hard could it have been to hold them accountable? |
| 14个重点项目是吴克铃的14个心思,14个心思编织着ー个彩色的梦:在适度 风险中创造适宜的速度,让昆山的经济尽快起飞,使昆山的老百姓得到更多的好 处 | Winter came. To the silver firs with their bark scraped off—are you not cold? To the silver firs bored full of holes—do you not feel pain? People once believed these trees had gone extinct a hundred million years ago under the assault of the fourth glacial age, only to discover them alive on Chinese soil. And now their roots—still bearing traces of ancient ice—were hacked at, dug up, and carried away. |
| 然而我们的生活中总是有太多的“然而”,要是少一点,少到不至于让人遗恨 终生,更不至于让民族后悔的地步就好了 ーー然而,还是有人对他的路子表示“不 理解”,并且有意无意地制造着ー种舆论、ー种压カ…… | When it comes to forest protection, what do we have left to be proud of? |
| 市委书记不是明确表示肯定了吗? | Deserts! Deserts! |
| 省委省政府不也给予关心和支持了吗? | Years ago, I heard a report on China National Radio's News Broadcast: deserts were closing in on Nanchang. The story jolted me and first sparked the desire to write this piece. But when you look closely, how could the danger be limited to Nanchang? Rampant logging leads inevitably to soil erosion, then to desertification, and finally to the slow advance of the desert. We simply fail to notice it because skyscrapers, neon lights, and streams of cars already narrow our vision—they block from sight the deserts creeping toward us. |
| 但这还不够,或者说还不足以说明问题。 | In late summer 1983, when I traveled to Chaoyang in Liaoning to give a lecture, I experienced wind and sand for the first time. The morning sun rose into a sky that was gray and blurred. Under the only sturdy tree on the entire street, elderly people and children strolled, stretched, and practiced martial arts—enjoying what might have been Chaoyang's only breath of morning green. |
| “大气候”或日大政策是压缩,是控制。 | Why “morning green”? Because once the sun climbed higher and temperatures rose, the briefly stilled winds lifted again, sweeping sand across the city. Within minutes, a thick layer of dust coated every leaf. Outside the downtown area, the roadsides had no trees at all—or only a few dying saplings, standing like lone sentries facing an overwhelming army of wind and sand. |
| 昆山的“高速度”不是和中央唱“对台戏”吗? | You couldn't tell whether the wind stirred the sand or the sand stirred the wind. On the hillsides, patches of dying weeds offered only faint specks of green; everything else was bare mountains and exposed ridges. In the fields, the sorghum barely grew longer than chopsticks, each ear holding only a few countable grains. People walked with dust caked on their hair, their faces, their clothes. |
| 有一阵子,昆山是苏州市乃至更大范围内议论的重要话题。 | Those days were the first time I truly understood how precious trees are—and how lonely the heart feels when the world holds no green. This was one of China's well-known impoverished regions. Without trees or forests, how could it not be poor? Yet local records show that centuries ago, this area was lush with water plants and humid air. Mongolian herders once grazed their cattle and sheep here on fertile grasslands. |
| 薛暮桥到苏州来了,似乎他对这个话题也感兴趣。 | Chaoyang still has many descendants of the Mongolian people. War and deforestation have reshaped the land so drastically that the desert now stands only inches away. And Chaoyang's story is far from unique. |
| 他是提出要实行宏观控制的经济学家之一。 | According to the research of Hou Renzhi, China's Ulanbuhe Desert also emerged because forests and vegetation were stripped away. Before large-scale reclamation in the Han Dynasty, the region was an endless expanse of grassland, with Yinshan blanketed in forest. During the Early Han, the state established Shuofang Prefecture here, administering six counties. The historian Ban Gu wrote that for generations the region saw “no smoke of war; the people flourished, cattle and horses filled the fields.” At its height, the population surpassed 136,000. By the Later Han, only a little more than 7,800 remained. |
| 可是昆山却似乎不受这个“控制”的约束。 | Cultivation had destroyed the vegetation. When local uprisings forced Han settlers to withdraw, the abandoned farmland quickly turned desolate. With no plants to hold the soil, erosion accelerated. Surface clay was stripped away by strong winds, sand and gravel drifted freely, and eventually an entire desert was formed. Coffin bottoms excavated from Han tombs now lie more than half a meter above the present ground surface—evidence that centuries of wind erosion have carved the land down by more than half, leaving behind today's barren wasteland. |
| 昆山依然保持“高速度”！ | The Horqin region in eastern Inner Mongolia was still “rich, fertile land with abundant water and grass” during the Song Dynasty. By the Jin period, overgrazing and logging had already begun to degrade the grasslands. In the late Ming and early Qing—when warfare had not yet reached the region—cultivation was neglected, and the land briefly recovered. But in the late 19th century, seeking revenue, the Qing government launched massive land-reclamation campaigns. In 1907 alone, princes and nobles opened more than 80,000 hectares of land in Horqin Right Wing Middle Banner, earning 238,000 taels of silver. Such unrestrained exploitation, heavy cultivation, and subsequent abandonment destroyed the vegetation completely. Once the grassland cover was gone, wind erosion lifted entire layers of sandy sediment. Fertile grasslands became the shifting sands we see today. |
| 这是怎么回事? | The ancient, mysterious jewel of Central America—the Maya civilization—also rose from deep forests. By 250 CE, Maya achievements in culture, architecture, and science had reached astonishing heights. Yet as the forests were destroyed and the environment deteriorated, the civilization began collapsing around 800 CE. Within less than a century, the cities were all but abandoned. People later said the Maya civilization vanished “overnight.” |
| 他要问个究竟。 | Early spring 1987—China faced a great drought. |
| 吴克铃开始是谨慎的,他小心翼翼的,甚至不敢把昆山经济发展速度的百分比 说出来。但他很快就发觉,这种顾虑是多余的,因为他感到,和经济学家谈经济,也 许更加有利于阐明他的观点和思路。他条理清晰,如数家珍,从头至尾汇报了昆山 的经济现状,14个重点项目的确立和筹建过程,还提出横向联合的依据,等等。 | The Yangtze was no longer the Yangtze it once was—its water shallower, murkier, inching past Wuhan like a sluggish brown stream. |
| 薛暮桥听了大为惊讶。他没想到ー个县长居然会独立思考创建适合本地情况 的独特路子,也没想到在国家实行宏观控制的情况下这个县仍然能够稳中求快,迅 速地改变着原先的经济面貌。他越听越觉得有滋有味,忍不住频频点头,说:“昆山 搞得不错嘛!” | People in Wuhan's three towns were stunned. The river had nearly exposed its bed. Of the eight massive piers supporting the Yangtze Bridge, only three still stood in the water; the other five lay bare under the spring sun. Children were running where currents once flowed. Flats of silt and mounds of stone—long hidden beneath the surface—now stretched across the river's width. It was impossible to ignore: the riverbed was rising, layer upon layer of sediment settling year after year. |
| 吴克铃接过话来:“现在中央批超高速度,我们完全拥护,宏观失控了,就得从 宏观上去控制;但我也感到,再好的方针政策,都不能搞一刀切,不能仅仅从表面上 去理解,也不能简单地生搬硬套,这样做,好像是’坚决照办’,实际上是偷懒,是教 条,也是ー种对中央政策不尊重的表现……薛老,我的话可能说重了……” | The Yangtze—once the giver of water—had become a conveyor of sand. |
| 薛暮桥连忙摆摆手。显然,身居高位的他是很难听到ー个七品芝麻官对他说 真心话的,现在有人向他敞开了心扉,显然是对他的极大信任,他感到高兴,也觉得 欣慰,忙说:“老吴,你说下去!” | It seemed unthinkable. If this drought continued—or returned year after year—could China's other great lifeline one day be blocked? And if the channel clogged, if the sediment kept rising, could Wuhan's three towns be buried under windswept dunes? Could deserts appear in regions that were once the heartland of fish and rice? |
| “举个简单的例子,我们昆山的ー些项目,已经投入了,厂也建成了,投入了而 不产出,实际是ー种浪费,所以我们就克服困难让它产出。有人就说,这是超高 速……” | The Yellow River's soil erosion has already been described. But the pale sand and silt the Yangtze exposed to Wuhan this spring represented only a fragment of its annual erosion area—360,000 square kilometers. |
| 批“超高速”,是薛暮桥的一贯主张,听到这么说,他不由得想了好一会,这オ 说:“我不是笼统讲的,我是说’固定资产投入不能超高速’,而且,这是就全局就国 家的宏观ー头来说的,像你们这样,从实际出发,走自己的路子,已经投入了,那就 应该尽快见效嘛!” | Across the country, regions suffering soil erosion have expanded from 1.16 million square kilometers at the founding of the People's Republic to 1.53 million square kilometers today—one-sixth of China's territory. Each year, 5 billion tons of soil wash away, the equivalent of peeling a one-centimeter layer of fertile topsoil off all of China's farmland. The nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium carried off amounted to more than 40 million tons—nearly the entire nation's yearly fertilizer output. |
| 吴克铃心中一热,他感到两个人的心已经相通了。 | These numbers alone should shake us. But the disasters that cannot be counted in numbers will require generations to endure—desertification. |
| 仿佛意犹未尽,薛暮桥又加重语气说:“老吴,要高速度。” | At the founding of the Republic, China had roughly 1 billion mu of desert and desertified land. Now it has 1.95 billion mu—13.6 percent of the country. Of the 950 million newly desertified mu, 770 million are grasslands and 180 million are farmland. While we busy ourselves with public duties and private worries—housing for our children, promotions, Party membership, climbing bureaucratic ladders—100 million mu of farmland and one-third of the nation's natural grasslands are being overtaken by sand. |
| 好痛快、好潇洒的薛暮桥! | China's rate of desertification—10 million mu every year—is the fastest in the world. |
| 吴克铃吃了 “定心丸”,薛暮桥也觉得不虚此行,两个人越谈越投机,越投机越 想深谈,可惜薛暮桥不能逗留太久,吴克铃就请他题词留念,薛老略加思索,便提笔 直书—— | Facing scenes like this, I often wondered whether I was dreaming. Once the forests disappeared, the Yellow River and the Yangtze had only two ways left to show their anger: by cracking the earth with drought or by drowning villages and cities with floods. Either way, the ending was the same: deserts were born. |
| 以上海为依托,发展横向经济联系,促使经济高速度发展。 | And now the deserts move forward: they climb the mountains, they swallow the grasslands. |
| 毕竟是著名的经济学家,也毕竟是经过了太多的风风雨雨的人,薛暮桥绝没有 因为自己批判宏观上的“超高速”就不加分析地一概否认微观上的“高速度”;相 反,他实事求是地肯定了昆山的经验,并且用十分明确而又凝练的语言,把这个经 验概括得恰到好处。 | Deserts devoured villages. Sometimes they advanced with roaring winds; other times they crept in silence—entering unnoticed, like a presence in people's dreams. Deserts have no dreams of their own, only goals. Anyone who says a grain of sand is insignificant is a fool. A desert is an army—highly organized, advancing and retreating with perfect discipline, specializing in confronting humankind. Their long patience is no mystery: they understand human greed better than we do. Humans love themselves too much, want too much, and will eventually cut down every last tree. Before saplings can take root, the sands arrive. Without fighting, they turn fields into wasteland. And soon after, they begin eyeing the faint outlines of distant cities. Even as their walls crumble, the people inside continue seeking pleasure. Along the desert's path, humans themselves become its advance guard. Nothing delights the desert more than the sound of axes—that sound means trees are falling, the road forward is open. |
| 无论你是什么“家”,也无论你是什么权威,都得具备这种胆识,都得具有这种 气量、这等胸怀オ行,否则,人民就不会尊重你,你这个“家”也就脆弱无比,ー碰即 碎 | Human beings can control deserts in small, temporary ways—but cannot fundamentally resist them. They show none of the courage in resisting deserts that they show when cutting trees. Wherever the sands advance, people flee. And on their flight paths, if they pass a tree, they still cut it down. One day, our descendants may have nowhere left to run. Perhaps they will no longer scramble to import luxury cars from Japan or Western Europe, but instead rush to buy camels from Africa. Camel humps will become the new fashion; the old Silk Roads will be trodden once more. |
| 社会主义不是也绝不可能只是ー个刻板的模式,社会主义是千百万人的永无 止境的创造,你想用一把刀“切”出个社会主义,就如要一 口吃成个胖子ー样,那オ 是真正的虚幻真正的乌托邦。 | I once truly had a dream like this—at the ruins of the ancient city of Loulan. An archaeologist was excavating a female corpse—she was from Shanghai, a brilliant graduate of Peking University in the 1950s, my senior. I followed her, uncovering a woman from four millennia ago: excavating a fragment of history, excavating a nightmare. I murmured a line for courage: “Yellow sand and a hundred battles wear down golden armor; yet we shall not return until Loulan is destroyed.” Around us: desert. Wind-scoured mounds. Shimmering mica stones. Lop Nor—once a vast inland lake—now a dead bowl of dust. Without water, a lake becomes a corpse; it becomes the final destination of the yellow winds that sweep across the desert. |
| 第二章静静地孕育着辉疊 | On a steep slope lay dry branches and withered reeds. I remembered that in ancient times this land had forests and aquatic plants—reeds grow only where rivers and marshlands once flowed. Yet here, in this silence, the archaeologist uncovered a tomb: a woman of the ancient Lop Nor people, her mummy astonishingly well preserved. She had a pointed chin, deep-set eyes, a high, sharp nose, and thin, firmly closed lips—still strikingly beautiful. She wore a handwoven woolen cloth on her upper body, a sheepskin skirt, and a small sheepskin cap with two goose feathers still tucked into it. Nearby were grass-woven baskets and winnowing trays. She had been a working woman, a member of an ethnic group long vanished. Had she lived today, she would be 3,900 years old. She was over forty when she died—yet she remains captivating even now. |
| 依托上海,借“东风”,摸索出一条横向联合的路子,这是吴克铃艰苦思索冒险 实践的重要贡献之一。但生活绝不可能也永远不会如作家笔下所描述的那么简 单、那么平淡。昆山的路,究竟是怎么走过来的,我能够采访能够知道的也仅仅是 一部分。创造者的痛苦又无形中转移到了创作者身上。ー个人要得到理解是多 么艰难。人与人有许多共通之处,但人与人又绝对不ー样。天下父母官多如牛 毛,如焦裕禄者几人?如吴克铃者又有几人?昆山走出了一条自己的路,走出特 色,也走出了成效。社会主义不是乌托邦,就因为千百万人在那里默默地实践和 创造。创造就意味着奉献,能够奉献的人是快乐的。于是吴克铃只字未提他曾经 遭受到的压カ,实在避免不了时就轻描淡写一句带过,他只是平静地思路清晰地回 忆着过去的岁月 | Another marvel: even the lice caught in the woman's hair were preserved—one of the rarest parasitic specimens on earth, their tiny hairs still intact. I found myself wishing she could part her pale lips and speak—tell us what Loulan was like 3,900 years ago: the narrow streets and winding alleys, the wine shops and small inns; the eminent monks who traveled from distant lands to worship at the Buddhist pagoda; the envoys from Persia, India, the Yuezhi, and Syria who passed through Loulan before journeying inland. |
| 六、并非异想天开 | But when a monk of the Jin dynasty came seeking Loulan centuries later, he found nothing. His account described it as “a place of evil spirits and scorching winds; all who encounter them perish, none return whole. No birds fly above; no beasts run below.” |
| 就在实行横向联合的同时,吴克铃开始构思另ー篇大文章,做起了自费开发经 济技术开发区的梦。 | Loulan had long been claimed by the desert. And Lop Nor—with its shimmering waters, its swaying reeds, its rich aquatic plants—had also become a realm of “evil spirits and scorching winds.” Why do beautiful things vanish so quickly? Why are green grasslands so fragile? Why does something as merciless as the desert advance without restraint—devouring not only a city but also a lake? |
| 这在当时,一般人连想都不敢想。 | I asked the mummy. I asked the camel. I asked the sky, the earth, the Kunlun Mountains. I asked the Peacock River. I asked the lone Buddhist pagoda still standing in the ruins. I asked the faint traces of murals on crumbling walls. Everything remained silent, except for the wind and sand. The sound of wooden fish, the chanting of monks, the soft murmur of prayer—O compassionate Buddha, have even these been buried? |
| 他不仅想了,而且要做! | Only a bundle of wooden slips remains: faint records written by frontier officials and soldiers of the Western Regions during the Wei and Jin periods. Those ancestors could never have imagined that the land they reclaimed—the fields they believed would secure the future—would one day leave their descendants nothing but desert and ruins. To plant grain, they felled every red willow, every poplar, every reed. |
| 金星电视机昆山分厂既是他形成开发区思路的契机,又是他最早的也是成功 的ー个实践。 | The woman's silence seemed to answer me: do you still need to ask? In her tomb lay branches, reeds, and woven baskets—proof that in her lifetime there were trees, grasses, water. The wool and sheepskin she wore show that cattle and sheep once drank quietly at the lake's edge. Lop Nor reflected drifting clouds by day and scattered moonlight by night—its depths like crystal palaces. And the two goose feathers in her cap tell us that birds once lived close to people, resting in the reeds before soaring into the sky. |
| 批准了的开发区,是国家投资的,政策也是特别优惠的。你要我开发吗?那 么,拿钱来给我用。于是,成千上万甚至是几个亿的人民币如雪花飘飘可以用车载 船装堆成一座小山似的过来了 ! | None of this is imagination. The Lop Nor woman is a living folk painting of Loulan's golden age: green forests, clear waters, flying geese, abundant grass, and Loulan itself—a thriving city along the Silk Road, peaceful and prosperous, rich with ritual and culture. But when land reclamation began and the greenery began to fade, that peace dissolved. No one understood yet what it meant. If the woman had consciousness in the afterlife, she could never comprehend why the land she hoped to cultivate in her next life had vanished. Lop Nor was gone. How many times had she admired her reflection in its waters, adjusting the feathers in her cap? |
| 昆山自己搞开发区,初步匡算,基础设施要几千万元。县里财政少得可怜,吴 克铃是两手空空一身“轻”的七品官,至于国家财政,你不在册,那一分钱也不能 | Loulan—do you know? Since the day you were buried, the wind and sand have never stopped. The desert expands each day; humanity withdraws each day. And still people cut trees, still they burn poplar groves for firewood. The desert has already pushed the descendants of Loulan to the foot of the Kunlun Mountains. Will people go there next to cut trees? Will the desert swallow the Kunlun as well? |
| 给,优惠政策一条也不能有! | Yet before the desert's advance, humanity is not powerless. We must stop approaching nature as conquerors and instead come with humility and kindness—to atone for the damage our ancestors caused and to safeguard the future of our descendants. If we return truth, goodness, and beauty to nature, nature will return even more truth, goodness, and beauty to us. |
| 这还不是主要的。 | Consider the Saihanba Forest Farm on the border of Hebei and Inner Mongolia. Beyond the Great Wall stretches a man-made forest of 900,000 mu (about 60,000 hectares) with 400 million trees. It is young, vigorous, and alive. Around it, the grasslands glow green; yellow sheep bound across the meadow; delicate wildflowers such as dove flowers, heartbreak grass, magpie blossoms, and corn poppies grow beside larches, Korean pines, spruces, and dawn redwoods, sharing the sun, the wind, and the clear waters of the upper Luan River. |
| 要紧的是风险,这里有经济上的,更有政治上的。建设开发区,好大的口气,好 大的胆子!你的“高速度”已经和中央唱“对台戏”了,难道还要别出心裁自作主张 搞什么开发区吗? | By day I saw—for the first time—a sky so intensely blue. By night I saw—for the first time—a moon so large, the stars so sharp and bright. What moved me most was this: the forest was built by human hands. All 900,000 mu of forestland (those same 60,000 hectares) were dug by spade, one shovelful at a time. All 400 million trees were planted one by one over thirty years. From the nearly one hundred pioneers who founded the tiny forest farm in 1956 to the 1,584 people who live there now, they endured life in earthen huts, mountains snowbound eight months a year, and decades of hardship to nurture this forest. |
| 当然,他已经找到了横向联合这条路子,但这还不够。作为昆山经济这个总的 “盘子”,方方面面都是联系在ー起的。你要“横联”,你就得具备横联的条件;你要 “外向”,你就得具备吸引外商外资的动人之处。所以开发区绝不是他突发奇想, 更不是心血来潮,一切都是事物本身发展的规律让人产生灵感产生欲望的。这里 的关键就在于你能不能及时抓住这个契机,敢不敢超前ー步做出决策。 | The forest workers told me: Who doesn't fear hardship? But if people don't tend the trees, the trees won't grow. Without this forest, the grasslands beyond the pass could not survive. And without forests and grasslands at the source of the Luan River, soil erosion would be unavoidable; sooner or later, the winds and sands would bury Beijing and Tianjin. Since not everyone can go to Beijing to climb the steps of power, become high officials, enjoy comfort, pull strings, or stroll around carrying birdcages, “then let us work here. The hardship is real, but there is joy too—when you look at this forest, when you breathe in this fresh scent. People cannot bear to leave the trees, and the trees cannot bear to leave the people.” |
| 这是需要胆识的。 | Walking through the forest, I felt I had entered a green kingdom. I placed each step with care, afraid of harming the young saplings—still as tender as children—growing in the shade. Inside the woods, there was no wind, and the air was far warmer than out on the open grasslands. Underfoot, the thick blanket of fallen leaves rustled softly. Beneath them, one could still see the debris of ages past: half-rotted, half-weathered remnants of ancient roots that had refused to disappear, leaving their faint traces in this newborn forest. |
| 钱从哪里来?不可能等,不可能要,也休想靠什么人的施舍,唯一的也是最可 靠、最踏实的办法是自力更生 | The director of the forest farm told me that during the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty, this had been a great primeval forest. In 1690, during the autumn hunt at Mulan, Emperor Kangxi rode out from the Chengde palace to chase deer here. But by the late Qing, large-scale logging for revenue had begun. When the dynasty finally crumbled, the forest that once sheltered it had already vanished—just as a dynasty that no longer cared to preserve even its own roof beams faded away. |
| 建设社会主义只能靠自力更生。建设社会主义不可能靠恩赐,也不可能依赖 谁的支援。输血只能救急,而不可能创造ー个活生生的生命,只有依靠本身的机制 增强造血功能才会有新鲜活泼的生命！ | By 1957, when the small forest farm was established, the grasslands beyond the pass were already in decline. With the disappearance of the primeval forest came changes in climate and temperature; birds and beasts departed with mournful cries, wandering toward new and unknown homes. |
| 搞开发区,即便是国务院批准的,国家也只能给予少量投资。归根齿结底要靠 自力更生,何况,昆山是自己的积极性、自己的要求呢? | “But once the forest returned,” the director said, “everything came back—the creatures that fly, the creatures that walk, the plants that bloom, and even the ones that don't.” |
| 他相信,过去有不少东西搞错了,但也有很多东西搞对了,不能因为错过就把 对的也否定了。自力更生难道也不对?自力更生符合中国国情,搞社会主义也离 不开自力更生！自力更生永远不会“过时”,自力更生必须也一定要延伸到现在延 伸到将来。 | This forest of 900,000 mu now shields a vast area of Hebei and Inner Mongolia—its grasslands, farmland, villages, and towns. The winds and sands are kept at bay; where greenery thrives, they have no choice but to retreat. |
| 只有自力更生才能给昆山的开发区带来希望。 | That autumn night, the wind had already turned cold. Wrapped in a cotton coat the director lent me, I walked to the source of the Luan River. It was only a small pool—no more than ten meters around—its surface trembling with the sound of flowing water. I dipped my hand in; it was piercingly cold and startlingly clear. The pool was barely a foot deep, yet the mysteries of the geological strata below were unfathomable. |
| 在县长办公会议上,他系统地谈了自己的设想和打算,又拿到县委常委会上去 讨论。吴克铃的主张得到了一致认可。 | All around lay boundless grassland, and to one side rose the vast black silhouette of the forest—solemn and dreamlike. When the moon reached its height, the grass and trees glistened under the fall of heavenly dew. |
| 消息传开,有人反对,有人怀疑,风声雨声ー阵紧过ー阵,他呢,也有自己的主 意:你说你的,我做我的。 | I once sighed: the project to divert the Luan River to Tianjin is well remembered in the annals of history—but what of those who protected the river's source? Who remembers the people who planted 400 million trees? Who remembers those who created this forest? In China, there are both tree-cutters and tree-planters. The tree-cutters outnumber the planters many times over. Planting a tree is far harder than felling one. Tree-cutting brings calamity; tree-planting brings blessing. These truths are as simple as “1 + 1 = 2” in a first-grade math book—yet somehow, we repeatedly fail to do the calculation. |
| 于是他开始选址,开始做多方面的调查和考察。 | Further west, a small group of scientific and technical workers continued their lonely struggle on the advancing front of the desert and the Yellow River. Only five of them remained year-round. Turpan has been known since ancient times as the “Prefecture of Fire.” Each year there are a hundred days when temperatures soar above 35°C, and forty days above 40°C. The heat, the dry air, and the fierce winds give rise to the most violent sandstorms. When the storms strike, crops vanish beneath sand; wells and canals disappear in an instant; houses collapse with ease. People can do nothing but sigh and retreat step by step. |
| 昆山的还有外地的经验和教训给了他很多启示。首先在选址上,他果断地否 定了在远离城区的地方,也否定了在老城区基础上的方案。远了,基础设施没有可 以利用的条件,开发费用必然大大增加;近了,在老城区,也不行。老城区4平方公 里,人口早已突破5万,按规定,人均100平方米,这个标准已经是超过了,怎么可 | To fight the desert here seems almost hopeless. The desert is too vast. The yellow winds are too fierce. The dryness, the suffocation, the desolation—all evoke only thoughts of death and hell. |
| 能在旧址上再建造ー个新的开发区? | In 1973, the sand-control station planted 20,000 poplar saplings in the barren dunes. Only one survived. In this ocean of sand, the chance of a tree's survival was one in twenty thousand. |
| 于是选择县城东边的一片土地。这里紧靠苏沪公路,交通极发达,又和老城区 紧紧相连,有不少事可以借助现有的力量。再说,这里已经有了几个不大的工厂, 要发展,也算有一定的基础…… | What no one could have anticipated was that, in the heart of the desert, these five science and technology workers and their companions would spend five years squatting in sand hollows, searching for pioneer tree species capable of withstanding the desert’s yellow winds, and developing a method that used winter water stored in karez wells as an irrigation source. By 1980, they had miraculously grown 5,000 mu (approximately 667 square meters per mu) of Calligonum shrubland in the sea of sand. Five thousand mu of trees! Five thousand mu of green! For yesterday's Turpan, this was a fantastic astronomical figure, like a fool's dream! Additionally, there was a desert botanical garden covering 200 mu, with 145 species of desert plants. The garden had already promoted over 10 species of sand-fixing plants to Shihezi, Yili, Inner Mongolia, and Gansu, providing 1 million seedlings. That is to say, faced with science and the dedication of intellectuals, more green would appear, and this was also humanity's only hope for breaking free from the desert's advance. |
| 他把上海的、苏州的和南京的规划专家请了来,一遍遍地考察,一次次地论证。 省里还在昆山召开规划论证会给予支持…… | Objectively speaking, such hope comes at great cost, while the enormous confusion we face is: there are far more people creating deserts than those controlling them! |
| 七、沉重的搬迁 | Forest Stroll |
| 规划只是ー个梦、ー张纸上的蓝图,实施却是ー种艰苦卓绝的战斗一苦就苦 在既要开发,而又不可能向上面要一分钱,苦就苦在既要与方方面面打交道争取他 们的支持,而在事实上又只能偷偷摸摸地进行! | I walked through the forest of Mount Tianmu. My thoughts scattered in every direction—from the Club of Rome and the Accademia dei Lincei to the shifting past and present of the old Yellow River course, from Loulan and the Maya civilization to President Roosevelt, to China's forest fires, to Heilongjiang's diseased pork, to the journalists who once pushed Roosevelt to halt logging, to the Chinese writers forbidden from entering the Greater Khingan Mountains, to those who held endless meetings and issued empty reports, to the giant pandas crying out as forests reached a state of emergency, to the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers that day and night carried the lifeblood of the Chinese nation… |
| 吴克铃担任了新区的总指挥。接着他调兵遣将,把城建局裴局长和陈副局长 推到了第一线,后来王接任局长也被派到了新区。有的事做得很辛苦,但起点不 高,他看了就不客气地批评,也正是伴随着各种议论和怨言,开发区一天天地在改 变面貌。1988年,开发区从“地下”转到“地上”，6月4日,他又派县委副书记石泉 忠担任常务副总指挥。 | A fallen maple leaf lay at my feet. The forest's calendar told me: it was October 20, 1987. |