Why does Dongting Lake's eight-hundred-li reed expanse lose more money the more it is harvested for papermaking alone?

Original title: [My Yangtze River] The past and present life of a single reed

An endless expanse of reed shoots on the lake islet (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

Reporter Jiang Wenjing and reed contractor Gong Lijun arrive together at the lake islet covered with reed shoots (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

According to a report by China National Radio's "News Vertical and Horizontal," "Gazing at the scenery of Dongting's mountains and waters, a green snail in a silver plate." In Tang and Song poetry, the eight-hundred-li Dongting Lake stretches vast and misty, a sight of endless beauty. When Huguang has a good harvest, the whole realm has enough; Dongting Lake is a richly productive "land of fish and rice," and because of its indispensable ecological regulation and storage function, it is also called "the kidney of the Yangtze River."

In earlier years, during the course of industrial development, Dongting Lake was once severely "wounded" - the reed shoots growing across the vast lake islets drew in the papermaking industry, bringing economic benefits but also bringing pitch-black, murky industrial wastewater, polluting the lake water and polluting the Yangtze River as well. In recent years, the people here have begun to reflect and change.

Reporter Zhang Xiaoxuan interviews Li Jianzhi (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

Reporter Zhang Xiaoxuan interviews the relevant responsible person of the Yuanjiang Wetland Management Bureau (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

After the start of spring, Dongting Lake sees continuous spring rain. At the Wanzi Lake wetland in the South Dongting Lake area, Li Jianzhi, president of the Yuanjiang City Nature Conservation Volunteer Association, jumps off the boat and bends down to pull a reed shoot from the muddy ground.

"Wild celery covers the ground and reed sprouts are short; it is just the time when pufferfish are about to come up." The plant Li Jianzhi pulls up, similar to a small bamboo shoot, is the seedling of wild reeds in Dongting Lake. When water rises it becomes a lake, when water falls it becomes an islet. Within Yuanjiang City, Hunan, in the heart of Dongting Lake, there are 860,000 mu of lake islets, and on more than half of that islet land, reeds grow year after year. Liu Tengfang, a villager from Lianhua'ao in Wanzi Lake, has lived guarding Dongting Lake for more than fifty years. "In spring it is all these green mountains and clear waters, you can see it all, right? By summer the reed shoots have grown to three or four meters, and the water has risen too. By autumn the reeds put out reed flowers, and after winter harvest, they are gone. There is only soil left, and that is white."

Li Jianzhi looks through binoculars beside the reed wetland, hoping to spot new migratory birds (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

Reed shoots after initial processing (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)

Living off the lake and eating from the lake has been the livelihood of the people of the Dongting Lake area for thousands of years. In Yuanjiang, the two pillar traditional industries are first fishery, and second the reed industry. In autumn, mature reeds are a raw material for papermaking. Around 2000, reeds could bring Yuanjiang 200 million yuan in fiscal revenue each year.

Yuanjiang's Lu Lake is the largest reed base south of the Yangtze River, with an annual output of more than 100,000 tons. Right now, stretches of reed shoots on the lake islets are like a green sea, while the reeds cut last autumn and now already withered yellow are piled by the roadside into "stacks" six or seven meters high, like stranded boats. Reed contractor Gong Lijun sighs, "The whole reed thing has only one use, and that is papermaking. Because those paper mills, they were shut down, and up to now with national environmental protection policies issued, it is now zero tolerance, so that led to paper mills shutting down and going bankrupt. As for reeds, across the whole market there is about 800,000 tons extra. Ah, of course I am anxious! In a market like ours, even 10,000 extra tons cannot be handled. With 10,000 extra tons you have nowhere to send them, not to mention that for every ton of reeds I ship out I lose seventy or eighty yuan. Before, the more reeds there were, the greater the profit they could generate. Later, after 2012, the more reeds you had, the more you lost."

Woodcutters from Guizhou and western Hunan used to come to Dongting Lake every winter to cut reeds; now they are called the main force for pulling reed shoots (Photo by Pan Jian, reporter for CNR)