Town and Country

There is a famous historical conundrum that China's level of technological development meant that it could have industrialised more than 200 years before we did in the west but something prevented China from taking the necessary final step. Different historians have speculated about why. Some have proposed that the singular power of the Emperor discouraged the free enterprise necessary to incentivise finding an economy of means for production. Others have suggested that China's complex linguistic diversity prevented the free exchange of invention necessary for the development of industrial technology. My favourite explanation, however, is that Chinese culture was fundamentally ecological - in other words too connected to nature to allow for the possibility of heavy industry. If this is true then this aspect of Chinese culture has diminished but not quite disappeared.

In cities like Jinan greenery is scarce and localised to a few designated parks or, in the case of Beijing, the Emperors back garden. Land prices are simply too high to ‘waste’ on commercially unproductive trees. These cities are dusty and polluted but not inhumane. They do, however, represent a complete dominance over nature. Even in the gardens of the Emperors, the Chinese tradition of cultivating nature as a medium for story telling means that the plants and stones are arranged every bit as carefully as the ink marks on calligraphy scrolls.

More harmonious relationships with nature exist out of town. The Great Wall for example, which should represent a harnessing of brute force to create an impenetrable barrier along China’s northern boarders is, in fact, little more than a ribbon gently winding round uncompromising jagged mountain tops.

Then to the Longji Terraces. A three hour drive from civilisation (Gualin) and a further one hour trek took us to the not quite top of a mountain from which we could see the contours made real of rice paddies descending down shear slopes. If we had visited in early spring the contours would have appeared razor sharp and filled with water reflecting the sky. Now only a couple of months later they are filled with rice crops and the mountains have begun to reclaim them eroding and softening their banks with new layers of vegetation. .

As the thunderstorms roll around the vertical mountains which surround us in Yangshuo, I'm reminded that nature usually wins out in an argument with human development. On a column outside the hotel a red line marks the high watermark of floods in 2008. The water would have half submerged all the rooms on the ground floor, not only of the hotel, but of the whole town. This settlement has formed in, what must be, the floodplain of the River Li because aside from the most adventurous of mountain goats and seemingly impossible trees which grow out horizontally no one can live on these mountains. We instead wind our settlements around them with a forced deference conceded only by the occasional mobile phone mast – a sign of the new industrial revolution.