The Guardian’s Asia Environmental Correspondent, Jonathan Watts, has been living and working in China and Japan for 18 of the past 21 years. As the issues of the environment have begun to crescendo, Watts felt the pressure polarising in the East, and set out to investigate why, and how the world could potentially be saved. When A Billion Chinese Jump was published last year, and has already received international acclaim for its insightful and terrifying look into the environmental issues in China, and the surrounding area. The travelogue maps the intricate links between the natural disasters, the man made mess, and the catastrophe that has been the consequence of their meeting, and also explores the options for the future success of mankind, whilst also telling the incredible story of a journey through China, in search of natural beauty in all forms. Hannah Slapper finds out the story behind this extraordinary project.

So, you’re in Hong Kong for the Literary festival. What are your thoughts on it?
I really like Hong Kong. It’s a brilliant place. It’s one of the most modern decent well-organised cities there is. I guess that’s partly because it’s incredibly rich as well. Everything I do is quite relevant to Hong Kong. It’s that meeting place of East and West. It’s the place where people often watch mainland China, whilst in China. It’s that place of objective detachment. Hong Kong is perfect for that.

How did you get into environmental writing?
It was partly by a series of accidents and partly by some happy coincidences. The accidents were that I ended up in Asia as a result of a slip of paper on a University notice board. I planned to stay for a year and ended up staying for much longer. I was originally in Japan, straight out of Manchester University as a hopeless scruffy English graduate and had a great time in Japan, very much liked the country. My wife is Japanese. I went back to the UK to study at SOAS. After that I returned to Tokyo, and started doing freelance work for the Guardian and it built up and it built up.

I was very fortunate to be covering that part of the world at that time, because there was a great deal of interest in it, partly due to the Asian financial crisis. I noticed over a period of time that China was becoming a bigger and bigger story. And in 2003 a post opened to be China correspondent, and I jumped at it. I was a general Asian news correspondent to begin with, but over time I’ve steered towards it. Not deliberately, I think the stories kept suggesting themselves. I found myself writing about environmental stories once every couple of weeks because it’s so important, and touched on so many other things, like development, people’s health, social stability or instability and protests, climate issues, energy issues. It really pressed itself upon you when you go to China. I just thought this is the place that has to make a change. Because the situation is so bad, it can’t just defer like other countries do. So that was the hopeful side of things.

And then you decided to write the book?
Yes, when it came to writing the book, at first I was going to write a travelogue, with an environmental focus, but not as strong as it turned out. That was in 2006, and a year or so later, Rob Gifford’s book China Road came out, and that was very much a travelogue as well, it was an East to West journey. So to distinguish my book even more, I decided to focus on the environment side, and make it even stronger. I originally tried to write it by combining it with my usual work, I thought I could just wake up a couple of hours early and the book would kind of just write itself. But that just didn’t happen, so all together I took off seven months from The Guardian to write it and in the course of that time they were very supportive. And The Guardian priorities happened to be shifting at that time, and two major things they wanted to focus on were China and the Environment, which was very lucky for me. They decided that it was a very crowded complicated fast changing media landscape that we now inhabit. Due to the internet we find ourselves competing with everyone on everything in every media. So to try and distinguish their brand they decided to be the first media organisation that I know of, to set up a network of environment correspondents around the world, so we set up an Asia Environment Correspondent, that’s me, and we have an American one and several people in London doing Europe. It allows people to see The Guardian as a green brand. So that is how I got this rather unusual job title!

Yeah I think the title is odd, but also so now, so relevant to the time we live in. You must have accumulated so much information through your job, about the past, present, and future environmental issues. How did you go about organising it into a book? It’s incredibly well structured – did this tie in with how you travelled or was it haphazard?
It’s kind of a bit of both. The book is largely based on a series of very specific journeys I did over the book writing period, particularly the latter chapters. They were created after I knew I was going to write the book. It also tries to capture and organise journeys I’d made before: journeys over 7 years and 100,000km. Its not one journey, its a series of journeys, organised according to this linear structure that tries to cause the trace of development – that is supposed to be the progress through the book.

It took ages to work out the structure, months and months and months. It was hard try to find a way to fit all this information together. I suppose the core of it, the base line, is one particular journey I took several years ago from Shangri La to Xanadu. The book starts and finishes with that journey. That was a really memorable trip for me. And its one of the great joys of being a China correspondent that you can still do stories like this. I wasn’t really after hard news, what I was looking for at the time was to try to capture what the Chinese people believe in. Because there was a lot of discussion about ideals and beliefs and whether China has become so materialistic that they don’t believe in anything, among Chinese people as well as foreigners. So I sort of set out from these two least-in-the-west romantic idealised places and travelled unscheduled, with very few arranged appointments, apart from people I just met on the journey, and asked them what do you believe in, and how has your life changed. I asked everyone a series of ten questions, about 30 people in total. That was a real eye opener. From Tibetan monks, to policemen, to railway conductors, to coal sellers, priests, beggars, in all of these people there was a lot of beliefs. But they were completely different. Some were very religious, some were very politically focussed. But what struck me the one thing people had in common was a belief that tomorrow will be better than today, that there is hope and progress. Many of them said that they believed that the environment will get better, and yet had stories about how bad the situation had been, and would continue to be for a long time. That was great, and the commissioning editor at The Observer who agreed to this story, it was a really lucky agreement, I’m not sure many editors would agree to that these days!

I get the impression that there was way more information than was present in the book, that you had to edit out so much and just keep to the main points, but that you hinted at the wealth of understanding and knowledge you’d accumulated about that country.
Yeah there is a lot more. I had to cut out a lot of material from journeys. I had to cut out a lot of journeys altogether. The strength and weakness of the structure I chose is that you’re limiting yourself to a particular topic in a particular place. So if you find some good material that is relating to forests, or water, but you’re not talking about that place in that chapter, then, I tended not to use it. I’d use the statistics but I couldn’t really use the stories as well. A lot got cut out because of editing as well. This is my first big serious book, and I found it hard to organise all the material. So the first draft I sent to the editor was 200,000 words! He told me to cut 80,000. So I spend a lot of time compressing even more! But when it came out, I was surprised to see how thick it was! If I could go back I’d probably trim even more.

No! I disagree! I think it’s more about how a book flows; it doesn’t really matter about the size, as long as it’s easy to read.
You’ve actually just reminded me of something! Reception has been not quite as I expected. I’ve found some people who’ve actually said they want to follow the journey – like a travel guide! That was not my plan at all! [Laughs] It’s an unusual genre. It is part travel story, part environmental book, part China book, a sort of eco-travelogue. And that makes it a little awkward to classify. At first when it went on Amazon – it was in the holiday and travel section! Not any more though.

That’s funny! Yeah actually after I read the book I had two duelling thoughts. One was that it had made me want to go into the mainland and explore, and the other was that I absolutely should not do that for fear of ruining everything!
It’s a very modern dilemma. I mean I’m the same. I go to places and touch them by being a journalist. And talking about them and being there. I guess it’s justifiable if you do it as lightly as possible. Be conscious. I don’t say don’t travel!

The thematic side of the book, you divide into the natural problems, the man-made problems, how they interact, and the future. Was there any particular part that was really difficult to write in any way? Or any part that particularly struck a chord?
I think there were lots of things. You go through ups and downs when you live in China, and you go through ups and downs when you take on a book project. There were definitely times during the writing, when I really felt I was staring into the abyss. Probably like a lot of people, until five or ten years ago, I would read environment stories now and again, but you don’t want to look at them all the time. Because it can be depressing or you feel like you have to go on a moral crusade or sacrifice a lot of things. A lot of it is very painful. So you mix it up in your life with a lot of other things you interested in whether its sport or dining or art or whatever, something more fun. But to write the book I had to just concentrate on all this fairly grim stuff, and there were times when there were so many problems that were accumulating, that I thought – how are we ever going to get out of this? I think towards the end of the book, when I looked more at the solutions, the mood lifted and my mood lifted. I thought I was still pessimistic, but not without hope. And that change of mood, since the book’s written we’ve seen some signs of progress because the situation is changing all the time.

But you’ve asked for a specific case that really strikes you. I think there are lots of very powerful human stories like those of the coal miners and how they suffer from having to work in very difficult conditions to supply the energy that China needs, and the pollution and the health impact there, and the cancer villages and the poor regulation over rapid industrialisation and corruption. And there are some very powerful human stories there. But I think the story that left the biggest impact on me, from all these years in China, was the loss of the baiji dolphin. And that hit me because as I write in the book, you get kind of numbed in a way to the fact we’re losing species or that numbers of wild animals are reducing all the time. But going out on this mission really hit home that we often have this complacent belief that once we really turn our attention to something and we spend enough money and we apply our brains and our effort enough that we can fix most things. That somebody out there at some point is going to fix everything. But when we look at species loss it becomes clear that sometimes you leave it too late. And this baiji mission really was the best of the best. The world’s leading marine biologists, the best technology, sponsorship from advisors, support from the Chinese communist party, it really was the A-team. Yet there’s no point having an A-team when they enter the field too late. That seemed to be the case. They didn’t find a single baiji dolphin, it was declared functionally extinct. When I came to write the story, having listened to lots of the scientists on board, I just thought wow, I’ve written about earthquakes and tsunamis and Olympics and World Cups and G8-Summits, and they’re all important, but the importance is on a daily basis or on a historical basis. A loss of a species which had been on earth for 20 million years, more than twice as long as man, was an event on almost a geological time frame. To write a story about something that happens in such a tragic way, once in 20 million years, that really hit home. Something has got to happen.

It seems that there is a constant conflict in China between people needing the surrounding environment to survive, but also needing to destroy it in order to make money. It has become a jarred cycle of necessity. You talk about changing values in order to solve this. Explain what you mean?
I would say the problem is mainly that the economy and the environment have become too detached from one another. They are very closely interlinked, and for tens of thousands of years that was very evident. Particularly for people who live on the land, they know very clearly that if they don’t have clean water and clean air and good soil; their economic wellbeing will be badly damaged, so the two are intertwined. I think increasingly, particularly over the last 200 years as we’ve moved further off the land and into cities, and I’m talking about our species and not just China here, our economy has been using increasingly sophisticated instruments which has little to do with what’s really going on in the environment, and this is one of the reasons we have a negative impact. Much of the damage done to the environment doesn’t register on any account books. We’re calculating all the things we get from nature, all the benefits, all the productivity. But all the damage we’re doing, there’s no actual loss accounting. An absolute key is better eco-accounting. It is making companies pay for pollution. It’s putting higher value on bio-diversity, on forests, on wetlands. Forests are the world’s lungs; wetlands are the world’s kidneys. We need to not consider the economy the enemy; we need to take it over. There are moves in this direction, mostly in universities and green groups, but these ideas are beginning to be taken up by major institutions like the World Bank and the Chinese government have talked about this idea of eco service compensation.

It is about changing values. It’s about putting a higher value on nature and a higher cost on pollution and over use of resources. It’s a very radical thing if it goes ahead, and I think it will. And it will be painful for a lot of people who have lived beyond their means by ignoring the real cost of things. I think that it is the most realistic way of going forward because the one value that everybody has in common is a financial value. Everybody uses money and most people recognise the value of currencies. It’s not a very pure tool, I mean, there are lots of other ways in which values could contribute, different forms of values: religion, education, culture. Those things are also hugely important and I would stress that those things could play a part, the only reason that I think economy would work better is because there are so many different religions and cultures that it’s hard to find a unifying value amongst them. Putting the eco back in the economy is fundamental.

I also like the idea of value being an economic word, and also a word about thought and morality. Your use of words is incredibly specific and literary. You write a polemical, geographic non-fiction book, but in a lyrical way. You have a narrative; you quote spiritual leaders, myth, and poetry. You use natural disasters as metaphor. How did you write that way?
That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said! I guess every writer tries to write in the most powerful persuasive way possible. I thought I might never write another book, so I tried to get as much as I could in terms of content. I tried to put as much as I could into making the style as attractive as possible. It’s one of the reasons it took so long, I was 16 months late in finishing it. A large part of writing for me is re-writing. I guess it’s just a case of trying to constantly improve what you’ve done. I think most writers would say a similar thing. There is a difference between the way I wrote the book and the way I write newspaper articles and that was one of the reasons I wrote it, I wanted to spend more time on one thing, rather than spending every day jumping from topic to topic. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of writing, you can totally get locked into your subject for 8, 9, 10 hours at a time and have weeks of thinking about things. When you can think of something that consistently over a period of time, all sorts of interesting connections and expressions and material suggest itself to you. Your mind makes those connections because you’ve concentrated on one thing for so long. It’s something you’re passionate about, and you’ll dedicate yourself to in it in every way possible.