EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Explanation:   These are two adjacent landscapes in the far northeast corner of China, in an area called Sanjiang Plain.  The top photo is of native wetlands in Hong He Nature Reserve, a relatively tiny island of natural habitat 21,000 ha (52,000 ac) in size.  The bottom photo is what most of Sanjiang Plain looks like today: croplands and agricultural fields, this one showing a "shadow" of dark fertile soil where a natural river once flowed.

Sanjiang Plain means "Three Rivers Plain" because 3 rivers demarcate the boundary -- the Songhua Jiang, Wusuli Jiang, and Heilong Jiang ("jiang" means "river").  The few remaining wetlands in the region are habitat for waterfowl, ibises, cranes, and many other waterbirds and songbirds and mammals.  It forms a critical linkage for birds migrating among Japan, Russia, and the Korean peninsula.   

Today, few natural wetlands remain in Sanjiang Plain, because in the 1950s, as part of his "Cultural Revolution," Chairman Mao Tse Tung engaged in a major national program to drain the wetlands, develop vast agricultural fields for wheat and other crops, and thereby convert the Sanjiang region into the "breadbasket" of China.  

The program was largely successful.  Mao banished thousands of political dissidents to the horrid conditions of the Sanjiang Plain to do the manual labor.  Summers were torrid, winters frigid, food scarce, disease and insects always present, and the laborers were forced into living and working on state farms that persist today.  It is a story little known and seldom told.  I traveled this region several times and in one state farm I viewed a heart-breaking photographic museum of those horrendous times showing the immeasurable hardships incurred by those banished because they dared to speak their minds.

Plowing with ox in Sanjiang fields
Click for larger version