A Force Of Nature

(2 of 3)
L

ast month, on the sunday when Premier Wen Jiabao opened the annual National People's Congress with a speech about building a "new socialist countryside," Yu headed for the town of Changgou, in a rural district of Beijing, "to try to save some trees." Friends in the district government had phoned with news that Changgou had announced it would bulldoze several of its constituent villages and bring in 5,000 laborers to create an enormous man-made lake as part of a program to attract real estate investment and tourism. They'd recommended that local leaders give Yu an audience and consider hiring him. "It sounds like the Great Leap Forward"—Mao's disastrous campaign to boost economic productivity in the 1950s—Yu said, as he sped toward Changgou in a van full of landscape designers. "But maybe I can stop them."

A group of local leaders took Yu on a tour of their project. Chalk lines marking the lake's proposed shores ran through villages and along roads. Yu leapt out of the car to take photos of a pair of bulldozers that looked tiny against the vast swath of empty land where they were mounding up dirt. Bounding past the officials, he turned his camera on a bird's nest high up in a poplar next to the mineral spring supposed to supply the lake. "He even takes pictures of that," marveled one official when Yu was out of earshot. Driving through town Yu passed a cluster of empty villas, waiting for the lakeside they'd overlook. Nearby, on a fenced-off piece of grass grazed an elephant and a giraffe, both made of plaster.

Back at the town office, the officials presented their plan. They played a DVD that showed pictures of large lakes in other places. Changgou's lake would be the center of a new resort, they told Yu. They would have windsurfing, golf and maybe skiing. The DVD played a montage of flowers opening in time-lapse followed by pictures of ripe fruit and beachside cottages. "This is our concept," one official told Yu, as the screen filled with hot-air balloons.

When it was Yu's turn to speak, he smiled. "I think you have a very good idea," he said quietly. "But I don't think your lake needs to be quite so big. What you have here is very rare. You're one of the only places in North China with spring water. If you use it up to make a giant lake, no one will come here. Right now I'm worried you're going to spend a lot of money, but lose value. Other places have lakes. Why not do something different? You could be a model of innovation."

Yu showed some slides of his work. "Wild grass," he said, pausing for emphasis. "It can be beautiful. It's very modern." Before long someone brought him a box of children's markers and a map, and he went to work sketching in islands of existing rice paddies within the planned lake's neat, rectangular perimeter. The official in charge of the project (who asked not to be named) winced. "I have plenty of paddies in this town," he told Yu. "If people want to look at them, they can go somewhere else. I don't need paddies in my lake."