China's Mass Climate Migration

摘要

Xiang Yang and his wife are sitting outside their house in Ma'an village, playing with their grandson. In front of them is a steep, bare slope, all that remains of most of the village's rice fields. Landslides happen frequently in the region-one last year killed six people-but Xiang has declined a government offer to relocate. His reluctance to move from one of the hundreds of counties in China that the government says are imperiled by natural disasters, extreme weather, or climate change shows the challenge Beijing faces in carrying out a relocation initiative, officially called "ecological migration." This effort puts China in the vanguard of expected population shifts as the climate changes. Xiang's village is in Guizhou, a mountainous southwestern province that has China's biggest ecological migration program. Most of the terrain here is karst, a thin layer of soil covering limestone bedrock. The geology has combined with deforestation and climate change to turn as much as 7 million acres into rocky desert. Some Chinese have embraced relocation. "It's better to move," says Li, 35, a former migrant worker who moved to the Zhengguang Migrant Settlement Complex in northeast Guizhou, where he runs a small package-delivery business (Li would give only his family name). "Now we have a hospital barely 10 minutes away, and my son goes to a school in our residential compound that provides breakfast and lunch," he says. The complex also trains migrants for jobs, paying them 40 yuan ($6.18) a day during a monthlong course before introducing them to an employer.