When a Billion Chinese Jump Read Online Free PDF

already gathering in the mountain valley. My assistant was sleeping. I was groggy. We had been driving all day on Route 204 and the view was not always utopian, electricity pylons vying with the breathtaking gorges for dominance. I also spied a hydroelectric dam and the wreckage of three recent accidents, including a bus that had slipped into a ravine during the previous day’s rains, killing the driver and more than a dozen passengers.
    I had not expected paradise and tranquillity, but the first impression of Shangri-La was disappointing. No sooner had we passed through the giant red ornamental pillars of the tollbooth than we hit a construction site. A short drive on, Zhongdian was even less dreamlike. Like almost every other county town in China, it was filled with square buildings decorated with white tiles and tinted windows. The crowds and traffic seemed as far from nirvana as the signs for the Shangri-La branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Shangri-La headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party.
    We checked into the Paradise Hotel, which was decorated with plastic azaleas. Its main feature was a pool that was rarely used because exercise is not recommended for visitors to an altitude of 3,300 meters. Nearby, an “old town” was being built almost from scratch. Carpenters were busy hewing timber beams and erecting curved roofs and tapering balustrades. Their work was part of a 300-million-yuan makeover aimed at making the town look less like Zhongdian and more like Shangri-La. The faux-antique decoration was the epitome of modernity. Some of the elegantly carved wooden buildings were already completed and full of trinket sellers offering fluffy yaks, prayer beads, and ceremonial daggers. On the new cobbled streets, black-market hawkers touted fake Rolex watches and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
    We entered a Tibetan restaurant and ordered tsampa. Two beggars wandered from table to table asking for money. They got short shrift from the only other customers, a group of soldiers, who were reluctant to interrupta drinking game that had one of them throwing up beside the table. “Don’t bother us. Go and ask the foreigner for money,” they said as they shooed the beggars away. Tired and grumpy after the long drive, I couldn’t help feeling that the closer you got to Shangri-La, the farther away it seemed from Utopia.
    I returned to the hotel dispirited, but other hotels guests were in a party mood. Next to my room, flashing red neon tubes illuminated the way to the Paradise karaoke bar, where hostesses were on offer for a fee: 100 yuan to sing together for an hour, 200 yuan for a shared dance, more for something extra. Shangri-La’s attractions came in many forms.
    At a hot-pot lunch the next day with A Wa, the chief of the local tourist bureau, I got a clear idea of the government’s priorities: “We have two targets: promoting economic development and raising people’s incomes, both of which we hope to achieve through tourism.”
    Between tasty bites of yak meat and mountain vegetables I had never seen before, A told me money and class would solve Zhongdian’s environmental problems. The region aimed to attract more middle- and high-end tourists because they spend and consume more, yet waste and pollute less. This was the same environmental compromise sought by growth-obsessed governments across the world: it was the essence of the “pollute first, clear up later” outlook on development. But, I wondered aloud, didn’t this still lead to the clearance of forests and grassland, the drawing of more water, and increased demand for timber, concrete, and other building materials? How could it be called a formula for sustainability? A answered that people’s welfare was the priority.
    Until recently, trees had taken the brunt of developmental stress. Yunnan’s forest cover had halved since 1950. 26 Although the government introduced tight logging restrictions in 1998, just a few years later timber