Tide of Change
The Yangtze River Economic Belt grapples with ecological hurdles for sustainable development
Li Zhengde regards the Yangtze River as the highway of his youth. Born in a small town in south China’s Hunan Province, Li grew up near the Zijiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze, and in 1976, boats were the major mode of transport there. In the 1990s, he had to take a year off from school due to illness and sailed to nearby Wuhan Province on his cousin’s wooden junk. It was his first trip outside Hunan and the one-month sailing experience is etched indelibly in his mind. He still remembers graphically how the finless porpoises would leap out of the water, marking curves in the spray.
Li is now a photographer living in Shenzhen who has since seen a larger world. Though 20 years have elapsed since he left his hometown, he still misses it and the river. In 2009, he decided to travel back every year and photograph the cities and lives along the Yangtze to track the progress of urbanization as well as atone for not paying enough attention to his hometown when he was young.
Rapid rise
In the 1980s, when Li was young, his grandmother’s family owned three boats. The smallest one was used as a ferry across the river, the medium one was a passenger boat owned by his sister and used to transport travelers from the town to other counties. The largest one was the wooden junk belonging to his cousin that was used to carry cargo down the Yangtze to other provinces such as Hubei and Zhejiang.
Later, a steel freighter replaced the wooden boats, roads were built alongside the river and opened to traffic, and the transportation of people and goods no longer relied solely on the water. Subsequently, many passenger ship routes were canceled and the family’s smallest boat was put out of commission. Modern transportation networks comprising high-speed railways, expressways, bridges, tunnels, ports, civil aviation and urban rail transit developed, facilitating travel and boosting the Chinese economy.
The changes are the fruits of the policy of reform and opening up started in 1978. In the course of the changes, the Yangtze River Economic Belt was conceptualized. In 2014, the State Council, China’s cabinet, released a guideline for developing the Yangtze River Economic Belt into a coordinated development zone for interaction and cooperation between eastern, central and western regions. In 2016, the Outline of Yangtze River Economic Belt Development Plan was published.
“The 40 years of reform and opening up have vitalized China’s cargo transportation on the Yangtze. The annual volume of freight traffic has increased 60 times, ranking first in the world for several years,” Tang Guanjun, Director of Changjiang (Yangtze) River Administration of Navigational Affairs, Ministry of Transport, said.
In addition, the belt produces one third of the country’s food, and accounts for more than half of China’s inland river navigation mileage, making it an artery of national economic growth. According to a report by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the GDP of 110 cities along the belt in 2017 reached 36.8 trillion yuan ($5.34 trillion), accounting for 44.5 percent of the national GDP. Its per-capita GDP was 65,835 yuan ($9,550), 10.4 percent higher than the national average.
Pollution perils
However, the rapid economic development in the past decades has taken a heavy toll on the Yangtze. The river has become polluted and aquatic life has become endangered.
“I’ve not seen a single finless porpoise since 2009,” Li told Beijing Review. “Those scenes of finless porpoises leaping out of