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Robert Marks on the Pearl River Delta

AT FIRST GLANCE, one might think that this image is of a beating heart (lower right) covered by a dense network of arteries and veins. In truth this is a satellite photo of the Pearl River delta and estuary in south China.1 To get your bearings, Hong Kong is the peninsula at the lower right, the city of Guangzhou is just left of center at the apex of the central artery (the Pearl River), and Macao (not on the image) is across the bay from Hong Kong. The image was captured on 24 December 1975 by the first Landsat satellite. Using remote sensing equipment with a ground resolution of forty meters, Landsat 1 took over 300,000 images. For south China, which receives about eighty inches of rain annually, many of those images are of clouds. Fortunately, the summer monsoon season gives way to clearer, drier weather in the winter, and hence to this image.	1
The metaphor of it being a heart is not far off the mark. Today, more than 35 million people live in those ten thousand square kilometers, making it among the most densely inhabited places on Earth. Moreover, since the economic reforms of the early 1980s, the Pearl River delta region has been the heart pumping China's emergence as a global economic power. As noted recently by the Los Angeles Times, "if it was an independent country, the greater delta [area] ... would be East Asia's fourth-largest economy and its second-largest exporter. Its sprawling, gray cities ... collectively draw foreign investment at an astounding rate of nearly $2 billion a month."2	2
Indeed, the rapid industrialization of the Pearl River delta region has put tremendous strains on the environment, with increasing signs of the collapse of some ecosystems. At dusk, the sun sinks, blood red, through the haze of industrial smoke. For centuries a center of silk manufacturing, in the 1990s the mulberry trees and silk worms in the dense system of waterways to the south of Guangzhou were replaced by fruit trees, not because there was greater demand for fruit, but because the air quality was so bad the silk worms died. Driving on two-lane roads at night, headlights rarely flash the eyes of any animals, and there is virtually no road kill, a rough indicator of wildlife populations.	3
Landsat 1, Scene LM8233602100500, 24 December 1975 (Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Data Center, Sioux Falls, S.D.).
Given the speed of the industrialization and the extent of the environmental degradation now afflicting the delta, environmental historians might suspect a familiar, declensionist storyline: Industry and human activity despoil yet another subtropical forest region. But that's not what happened. Even those who know a little Chinese history might suppose that the vast population increase of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led Chinese to deforest the delta, leaving a vast farmland upon which later factories could be built. But that too is not what happened.	4
When I first began researching the environmental history of south China, I had assumed that the Pearl River delta was a natural phenomenon that had been lying there awaiting human exploitation, in particular land clearance for settled Chinese agriculture.3 What I discovered instead is that the Pearl River delta is very much a human creation.	. . .