Green dream vanishes in puff of reality
It's a classic case of good intentions gone horribly wrong. Huangbaiyu in northeast China is home to 1380 farmers. In 2003 it was chosen to be the site of China's first ecologically sustainable model village.
After decades of promoting economic development regardless of the environmental consequences, China's leaders are now talking about "sustainable development" as they face record oil prices, energy supply concerns and widespread social unrest prompted by toxic spills, smog and polluted waterways.
Several years ago leading American "green" architect William McDonough teamed up with Deng Nan, the daughter of China's former leader Deng Xiaoping, to promote economically sustainable development in China. The China-US Centre for Sustainable Development, co-chaired by McDonough and Deng, decided to transform Huangbaiyu into a living example of how technology and knowledge could improve villagers' lives by reducing their energy costs.
A new village of "eco-dwellings" - houses built from hay and pressed-earth bricks, fully insulated, solar-powered, and facing south to maximise sunlight - was to be built. The village's 370 households would all be moved into the centre of the village so the higgledy-piggledy plots of farmland and existing houses could be consolidated to increase the amount of land available for farming.
The new eco-dwellings, set to cost 27,900 yuan ($4600), were meant to showcase "green" products from US companies such as BP, Vermeer and BASF, who all donated materials for the project.
Huangbaiyu was set to be a national model of what could be accomplished as China rationalises farming land and moves half of its 800 million peasants to cities by 2030.
The first phase of the project, 42 houses painted yellow with red-tiled roofs, is almost finished. But they have deviated substantially from the masterplan.
Only three of the houses have used the originally-envisaged hay and pressed-earth bricks. The rest use compressed bricks made from hay and coal-dust. There is debate over whether the use of coal dust represents a health risk.
Only one house has solar panels; the rest were built to burn timber like ordinary houses. They have now been modified to use gas from a biogassification plant that Mr Dai built next door, after buying the technology. None of the houses are facing south as planned. And inexplicably, the new houses also have garages - although no villager can afford a car.
American anthropologist Shannon May was sponsored by computer chip giant Intel to live in the village to monitor the transformation. But after more than a year she is dismayed at the outcome, and worried that in order to "save face", the village may continue to be promoted as a sustainable village and replicated elsewhere.
Huangbaiyu's village chief, Dai Xiaolong, was chosen to turn McDonough's detailed eco masterplan into a reality. Mr Dai's previous businesses have included a zinc mine, a steel mill, an alcohol (Chinese white spirit baijiu) factory and now a fish farm. He borrowed most of the 8 million yuan the eco project has so far cost, and said the government has contributed only about 380,000 yuan. In effect, the "model sustainable village" has become a private enterprise housing development.
The problem is, no one is buying. The price of one of the eco-houses is now hovering around 100,000 yuan - twice the cost of building an ordinary new home.
Life for Huangbaiyu's residents, where winter temperatures reach minus 30 degrees, is hard but the water and air are clean. Every family grows vegetables and keeps chickens, cashmere goats or trout to supplement an annual corn crop. Many of the men work in local coal mines or travel to the city in search of labouring or factory jobs.
Villagers use wood from the surrounding hillsides to cook and heat their homes. Each family is allocated an area from which they are permitted to cut timber and they manage it assiduously over a 8-15 year cycle to ensure that the hills are not denuded. Water is pumped from hand-dug wells; washing is done in the creek. It's old-fashioned sustainability.
Mr Dai says that in his sustainable new village, farmers would no longer need to cut wood or buy bottled gas as they do now to supplement the timber, as his biogass is more efficient and cheaper (if one does not include the capital costs of building the plant and pipes).
Mr Dai hopes to become rich from building similar "sustainable" villages throughout China, and by selling his biogassification energy plant design and equipment to other local governments. He is also setting up a factory to build the water heaters each new eco dwelling needs to utilise the gas from his new biogassification plant, which burns waste organic material, such as grasses and husks left over from harvest or animal excrement, and turns it into gas.
Biogassification has been used elsewhere in China and India to provide energy for cooking but its ability to provide heating energy, a more intensive use, has not yet been proved.
Mr Dai is proposing that villagers exchange their existing house and attached land (but not their farming land which is not theirs to sell) for a new "eco dwelling" and has suggested that local authorities should compel the villagers to move.
If that doesn't work, he says he could turn the empty houses into tourist accommodation - although no tourists now come to the village. He suggests the villagers could come and work as waiters or cleaners with part of their wages going to Mr Dai to pay off the cost of buying an "eco dwelling".
But why would a self-sufficent farmer contemplate trading in their old house and land for a new "eco dwelling" that has less land attached, no room for raising animals or storing grain and is several kilometres away from their farming plots for the possibility of a tourism job and a big mortgage?
Villagers, in whose name the project has been done, say they weren't consulted about the new village and would be reluctant to give up their homes.
Mrs Jiang, 34, whose husband works in the Benxi steel mill, is typical of residents when she asks: "Why would I want to pay 50,000 to 60,000 yuan, which I don't have, for this new house? The new village has no relationship to us."
Her neighbour, Mrs Li, agrees: "It's too far away from our farms, we would have to walk so far back and forth every day and when it rains... there is no incentive to move."
Another villager, Ms Zhang, says farmers thought long-term and would be reluctant to move. "No-one consulted us about what we wanted in a new house or if we wanted to move there. The new houses are only suitable for factory workers, not farmers. If they want us to move they have to establish a factory there first".
Despite the many unanswered questions, dozens of government delegations have come to inspect China's first sustainable village to see if they should adopt a similar approach. Mr Dai is hoping that foreign investors will also be interested in starting up businesses here.
Shannon May says the project was misconceived from the start. Whatever Huangbaiyu needs it is not 42 new houses, let alone the 200 planned for phrase two of the project, she says. "Even if the houses were more affordable and even if you raised people's income, they may not want to spend the money on a new house; they might want to send their daughter to highschool or get surgery for grandma or open a small store. It's a big presumption that people want a new house," May says.
"Mr Dai is a businessman with a big idea and a big heart, but he is doing this project to make money and he has no training in ecology or sustainable development or building or energy efficiency and it wasn't made clear to him that you can't just build the new houses exactly the same as the old houses."
The local representative for the China-US Centre for Sustainable Development, Ping Zhong, said phrase one of the project was to be reviewed in November.