In Chinas Inner Mongolia, mining spells

misery for traditional herders

As China develops mineral resources, an ancient way of life is threatened.-Mongolian herders

tend their sheep near the Datang coal-to-gas plant. The herders have protested against the
air and soil pollution caused by the plant. Gilles Sabrie/For The Washington Post

By Simon Denyer April 7 at 3:30 AM

HOLINGOL, China When the wind blew in their direction, smoke and dust from a
huge aluminum smelter would drift across the grasslands where herders had grazed
their flocks for generations in Chinas Inner Mongolia.
A few years after the smelter opened, herders in the area said their sheep began falling
sick, with jaws so painful they could not eat. Soon, thousands of their animals had
died. When they complained, the government simply arrested five of their leaders and
forced the others to resettle in the nearby city of Holingol, demolishing their original
homes.

The vast, wind-swept grasslands of Inner Mongolia have been home to nomadic
pastoralists for thousands of years, but the rich resources that lay under these rolling
prairies have proved a curse to the people who have long called this land their home. A
boom in mining and mineral industries has polluted the grasslands, marginalized
herders and pushed them from their homes. Now, a fall in coal and gas prices could
spell more pressure on government spending, and more misery for herders.
Seventy-five-year-old Du Shaocai was moved from her grasslands home to a small
apartment in Jarud last year, and she now lives apart from her sons and
grandchildren. She watched her familys livestock die after the smelter was built in the
midst of massive coal mines.
It was horrible. The sheeps teeth became abnormal and broke through their lips, so
they couldnt chew the grass, she said. The powder poisoned the grass, and then it
poisoned our livestock. We didnt want to leave the grassland, but the government
forced us to resettle here.
A spate of protests over land rights and mining projects reached a climax this past
weekend as police crushed a three-week-long demonstrationagainst toxic waste from a
chemical refinery in the eastern part of the region. One protester was reportedly killed
and 100 injured.
The government announced Monday that it would close the refinery, but tensions in
Inner Mongolia are on the rise, posing fresh problems for Beijing as it attempts to
maintain stability while global commodity prices slide.
Local herders in Inner Mongolia have never benefited from mining, but have only lost
their land and been victims of environmental pollution, said a local academic who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. Now that
the price of coal and other resources has peaked, revenues will shrink, which will cause
the local government to invest less in education, the environment and peoples
livelihoods. Local herders lives will get even harder.
Inner Mongolia is Chinas second-largest coal producing region, the main global
supplier of rare earths and the site of large natural gas supplies. The resources have
helped to drive Chinas prosperity and have brought undreamed of wealth to a few. But
unregulated mining and refining have polluted the grasslands, driven herders from
their homes and bred a culture of corruption and dependency.
Their pastoralist communities are being torn apart, and their pastoralist economy is
being devastated, while the natural environment where Mongolians have maintained

their traditional way of life for thousands of years is being destroyed by Chinese miners
and settlers, said Enghebatu Togochog, director of the Southern Mongolian Human
Rights Information Center in New York. Mongolian herders are trying their best to
defend their land, culture and way of life, but very little resources are available to
them, and government policies are very hostile to the Mongolian way of life.
Protests across the region
Nearly twice the size of Texas, the sparsely populated Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region straddles northern China, lying south and east of Mongolia itself. It is home to
nearly 25 million people, of whom just 17 percent are ethnic Mongols.
Gently rolling prairies, carpeted in yellow-brown grass, stretch in every direction, with
sheep, cattle, horses and, occasionally, a small camel train, scattered across the endless
landscape. Yet the idyllic vistas are also punctuated by mountains of waste from huge,
open-cast coal mines, by wind farms and by the smoke stacks of power stations that
send dense clouds billowing into the blue skies.
In May 2011, a Han Chinese coal-truck driver killed a Mongol herder who was
protesting mining, sparking days of protests. The government responded by cutting
the Internet and temporarily imposing martial law, but also by promised an overhaul
of the coal industry, stricter environmental protection, and hundreds of millions of
dollars of new spending to promote Mongol culture.
But interviews with herders across the region showed that the fundamental causes of
discontent have not gone away.
Smaller, sporadic protests are still taking place in almost all parts of rural Mongolia,
on an almost daily basis, said Togochog. Often they are ignored by the authorities,
but if the protest escalates, then the response is crackdown, he said.
One herder was reported to have hanged himself outside a government building in
January to protest a land grab. Five villagers who demonstrated against the aluminum
plant here were arrested, herders said: three remain behind bars, while two, party
members and retired village leaders, died of ill health after being released.
On a recent trip to Inner Mongolia, a Washington Post team was followed for several
days, sometimes by three or four cars packed with security officials and police. At least
15 different cars were involved in the tailing operation. The reporting team was
repeatedly questioned, told they could not report there without prior permission, and
often blocked from talking to locals.
Nevertheless, a clear picture emerged of herders who feel the mining industry has

polluted their land without bringing them any rewards.

Everyone is unhappy about the mining, said Eerdun, 39, who says he lost much of
his grassland to a huge coal mine in West Ujumqin. The compensation he received was
worth a small fraction of its value and equal to a single forklift load of coal and he
had to move his home away from the mine.
As the sun set over the grasslands, he perched on a small stool inside his yurt, the
traditional domed tent that has come to symbolize Mongol nomadic culture. No one
wanted to move, but we were forced to, Eerdun said. Like many Mongols, he uses one
name.
The curse of mineral wealth
A study by a team of Chinese academics published last year titled The false promises
of coal exploitation found that the mining industry had not raised herders incomes
and that damage to the fragile grassland environment from mining activities had
increased the risks that herdsman will have to endure in the future.
Inner Mongolia suffers from the resource curse, experts say. The easy money
generated by mineral wealth produces a narrow elite with little interest in the welfare
of common citizens and often lower levels of spending on education and health care,
said Zhan Jing, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The resource economy tends to crowd out other economic sectors, and in the long
run, that is going to be dangerous, she said.
Herders grievances have also been fueled by decades of misguided government
policies. The fencing of the grasslands in the 1980s and 1990s ended the nomadic
culture and upset the natural balance between pastoralist and grassland that had
existed for thousands of years.
The result has been overgrazing and degradation of the grasslands, says Li Wenjun, a
professor at Peking University. Government policies to resettle some herders onto
farms have caused more pressures on scarce water resources, because agriculture is
water-intensive. Effectively, she said, the grazing ban was solving one problem by
creating a bigger one.
Mining has also sucked up vast quantities of water, depleting underground reserves,
and causing hundreds of lakes to shrink or disappear, said Fang Jingyun, another
Peking University professor and director of the Institute of Botany at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences.

Fluoride poisoning
In Inner Mongolias Holingol, the Huomei Hongjun factory is one of the largest
aluminum smelters in the world, conveniently located in a coal mining district because
of the tremendous amount of electricity required by the smelting process. Its coal-fired
power plant was fined by the Environmental Protection Ministryin 2011 for excessive
sulphur dioxide emissions and for falsifying emissions data. But it is the smelter itself
that has attracted the herders ire.
A government document obtained by Ceng Jing Cao Yuan, a local advocacy group,
showed that more than 12,000 sheep died and 23,000 fell sick in seven villages and
two farms near the factory between 2008 and 2009, the probable cause being high
levels of fluoride in their bones and the grassland, although tests on herders showed no
ill effects on humans. The document carried no official stamp and its authenticity
could not be independently verified, but the symptoms described by the herders were
consistent with fluoride poisoning, a classic side-effect of untreated emissions from
aluminum refining.
China Power Investment Corp., which owns the smelter, did not respond to a faxed list
of questions. A local environment official, who declined to give her name, confirmed
that an investigation had been carried out into the death of livestock but said that she
was not aware of its findings.
Outside Holingol, Dus son Bao Chaganbala said the family had lost 1,000 sheep,
roughly half their flock, and been forced to sell the remainder at half-price.
Compensation in the form of cash, an apartment and a teaching job for his daughter,
he said, had failed to approach the losses the family suffered from losing livestock and
land.
For his mother, the psychological losses were more significant. She used to live with
her extended family. Now she lives alone and worries that her sons will not be able to
cope in their new lives. She used to have a view across the grasslands; now she looks
out on a characterless back street.
I am old and I dont ask for anything, she said. But how will my sons survive
without the grasslands?
Xu Jing contributed to this report.
Read more
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Simon Denyer is The Posts bureau chief in China. He served

previously as bureau chief in India and as a Reuters bureau chief in Washington, India
and Pakistan.
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