My Book Closer to Heaven and Me

By Erik R. Nilsson

Erik meets a girl for whom he provided a surgery

On May 12, 2008, our planet ripped itself apart, and a portal to hell opened on Earth along this seismic tear in Sichuan province. I don’t just mean hell as a metaphor.The quake zone literally assumed a vast geography inhabited by tens of millions of people, wailing and gnashing their teeth, and nearly 90,000 dead or missing.

I start my new book,Closer to Heaven: A Global Nomad’s Journey Through China’s Poverty Alleviation, there because I was supposed to be there. But because of a scheduling change, I wasn’t. I later spent a total of eight months making 15 trips through the quake zone, and spent my birthdays, which often overlap with China’s Tomb Sweeping Day, at a mass grave.

What I saw over the years was a miracle, as the rescue and recovery lifted the survivors in Sichuan further and further from hell, and closer and closer to heaven. It seemed unfathomable－until it became reality.

But it served as a reminder of how poverty, geology,geography and natural disasters often intersect.

Perhaps few people outside of China realize the magnitude of the geological and geographical obstacles that have made this miracle all the more miraculous.Roughly two-thirds of the country’s topography is puckered into mountains, and much of its vast territory is seismically twitchy. The country also hosts some of the planet’s major deserts, including the Gobi, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the planet’s “third pole”. It also needs to feed 1.4 billion people, while only roughly 6 percent of its land is arable.

I have spent my life since 2006 traveling to every province, municipality and autonomous zone on the Chinese mainland, exploring firsthand from the field exactly how China has achieved this miracle, the scale,scope and speed of which are unprecedented in human history.

I’ve also reported from the front lines of such major national and international events as the 19th Party Congress, the two sessions, the Belt and Road Forum on International Cooperation, the BRICS Summit, the Sino-African Forum and the like.

What makes that interesting－reporting from these major events－is seeing how policies developed in the Great Hall of the People actually work on the ground, as I witness their impact while I’m in the field.

That is, perhaps seeing what I’d seen announced as policy in places like the Great Hall of the People actually manifest on a mountainside in a faraway part of the country.

Now, I think it’s worth asking, why focus on poverty?Why make this your life’s primary concern? And why has the Chinese government focused on this and even worked to accomplish the final and ultimately most difficult steps last year, while abandoning GDP growth targets amid the COVID-19 outbreak?

One important reason is that poverty compounds virtually every form of human vulnerability to every form of human suffering.

Worldwide, it makes people more likely to die or be harmed by anything from a landslide to HIV to an unplanned pregnancy to malnutrition … You name it,living in poverty makes you more susceptible to it.

Indeed, a primary component of China’s poverty alleviation－and there are many－is the diversification of strategies, especially those that turn geological disadvantages such as droughts into advantages such as solar farms made extra productive by cloudless skies.

I recently visited Jiangxi’s Ganzhou. There, alone,local authorities are using salted duck eggs, ethnic She culture, livestreaming farmers, e-commerce and red tourism, among many other methods, to alleviate poverty. The trip showed me how mobile-internet technologies are becoming just as important to food producers as the tools used to cultivate the earth in places like Ganzhou. The farmers I spoke with began to multiply their incomes when they started livestreaming,usually after receiving training from the local governments.

Agriculture is as old as civilization itself. But new technologies are enabling farmers－who’ve traditionally been some of the planet’s poorest people, and still are in much of the world－to harvest new prosperity.

The writing was literally on the wall of a 5G-livestreaming training center and studio I visited in Jiangxi. Emblazoned in calligraphy on the gate are the slogans: “Let mobile phones become the new farm tools”, “Let livestreams become the new farm work”,and, “The internet reaches everywhere under heaven.”

And this approach is far from unique to Ganzhou or even to farming.

Many rural settlements that were below the poverty line have been using livestreams and short videos to promote their villages, townships and counties as tourism destinations, sometimes with dramatically positive results.

And the COVID-19 outbreak accelerated this preexisting trend by boosting sales, since more people began to eat at home and experience wanderlust during lockdowns.

Some of these livestreamers have become national celebrities.

I spent a day with a seemingly mid-level web celeb called Sister Passion Fruit, or Baixianguo Jie. Her “office” is a desk set up in front of a camera in an orchard,where she promotes and sells the produce from which she takes her nickname. The woman from Xunwu in Jiangxi’s Ganzhou is operating at the intersection of some of the most ancient and emergent human innovations－agriculture, the precursor for civilization that allowed humans to settle rather than hunt and gather, and information technology, one of our species’most recent inventions.

And there are places in China where agriculture isn’t even possible, due to the natural conditions.

My experiences in Sichuan led me to another quake zone, in the nomadic Tibetan communities of Yushu on the remote Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. People there had also long struggled to survive another, albeit slow-motion,disaster sired by geology－aside from the quakeshocking poverty, propped up mostly by extreme elevations. These altitudes mean that the areas’ nomadic inhabitants can’t plant crops due to the cold, further exacerbating their poverty simultaneously aggravated by their remoteness, which initially made infrastructure development daunting.

Sichuan taught me to find light in the darkness. Qinghai taught me to create light when there seems to be none to be found — literally.

I started working on the plateau by installing solar panels in an isolated school without electricity. While Yege township’s children were the first generation who could read, they would effectively become illiterate after dusk. That was because there was no electricityhence, no light－in the seven tents that 78 of the primary school’s 137 children called their “dorms” in 2011. I hadn’t realized that the tents, rather than the schoolhouse, would be where I’d install the panels before I arrived.

The project was meant to be a one-off. But that year I realized: “Sometimes, the light at the end of the dark tunnel of poverty is the one that children can read by at night.”

Again, I never imagined that this was the first step on a new journey through darkness and light, literal and metaphorical — and a new chapter in my chronicling of,and contribution to, China’s poverty alleviation.

Upon seeing the nomadic areas’ dire needs, I resolved to do more. From there, friends and I went on to electrify most schools throughout Yushu’s Qumarleb county.We also provided metric tons of clothes, computer labs,libraries, food, medicine, coal and even yaks, when a blizzard killed most of a school’s herd. Indeed, when I first arrived in China, I never imagined I’d end up buying, riding, milking and getting kicked by yaks —let alone harvesting their dung for fuel while camping with nomads.

Even there, on the “planet’s third pole”, China’s poverty-alleviation miracle means that the Qinghai I’ve returned to recently is a different place than I first saw in 2011. It’s unrecognizable now. This seemed unfathomable then.

I was astonished to return to Yege, the first school where I began our projects in 2011, in 2019, after several friends and I drove 4,000 kilometers from Beijing to Qumarleb.

Yege township had 5 percent electricity access during my first visit. As of a few years ago, all of Qinghai－the whole province－had power 24/7. And Qinghai set a new world record when it ran entirely on green energy for 360 hours in June 2019, beating records it had set in 2017 and ’18. It even produced a surplus of power that it shared with central and eastern provinces during the period. By mid-2019, 86 percent of Qinghai’s installed energy capacity came from renewables. I never could have imagined that in Yege in 2011.In 2019, I entered through the new gate to see the new buildings, including new dorms for teachers and students. But I was more amazed by what I found inside them. The school was putting the finishing touches on its computer and science labs. The science classroom was outfitted with not only typical equipment like test tubes and beakers but also interactive models of human and heavenly bodies. And the actual bodies of animals preserved as specimens, such as those of frogs undergoing metamorphosis. Other rooms were heaped with supplies for the new art, music and physical education classes.

The educators’ education levels have also advanced.Years before, few qualified instructors were willing to work at the school because of the extreme conditions.Many had only finished primary or middle school and earned as little as 500 yuan ($73) a month. In 2011,the kids slept on big boards on cinder blocks without mattresses in the tents. In 2019, the children slept on thick mattresses－one per child－with individual blankets on bunk beds in dorm rooms with not only electricity but also with electric heating.

When we started working in the region, carbon dioxide poisoning from coal had caused some incidents. So,when we bought a metric ton of coal for a school, we also bought CO2detectors.

Those problems are some of the many that just don’t exist anymore. It’s something I never imagined could happen so soon. But it did.

Qumarleb’s average elevation of over 4,200 meters means there are few natural resources, aside from caterpillar fungus, which was becoming scarcer with desertification.

It seemed unlikely that Qumarleb’s older generation could work as migrants. They’re mostly illiterate, and don’t speak even standard Tibetan, let alone Chinese.Most lacked skills beyond herding since husbandry had been just about the only livelihood for centuries. (I used to call it the “yakonomy”.)

I’ll never forget once buying books for township schools’libraries in Qumarleb at a bookstore where the manager was illiterate. Tseringben, my friend and partner in the area,ended up writing our receipt, since the manager couldn’t.

The government compensated nomads for their livestock during herding restrictions and provided welfare. But the county faced pressure to create jobs in a remote location with hardly any resources or industry.

In 2019, Qumarleb’s vocational-training center wasn’t far from the county’s new “poverty-alleviation street”,as locals called it. There, the governments of villages throughout the county ran such businesses as hotels,restaurants and shops on the edge of downtown. Profits were split among villagers annually. At the vocationaltraining center, which is free, former herders learned to work as cooks, barbers, mechanics, machine operators,electricians and home decorators. Many were taught local trades, such as hosting traditional Tibetan weddings, performing folk dances tailoring Tibetan robes and painting thangka, which are traditional Tibetan Buddhist scrolls.

Since the government has brought unthinkably rapid development, we no longer work on such “hardware”projects as providing electricity. Now, we focus on helping nomadic children with disabilities with surgeries, prosthetics and specialized wheelchairs for navigating the grasslands.

One surgery was for a girl with a severe cleft palate.Other kids called her “Monster”. She’d lived in such a remote area that she was amazed when she first rode an escalator in Beijing. She was shocked by the “stairs that move themselves”. A friend paid to fly her home after the surgery. She was amazed because she didn’t know that planes flew above the clouds. And she said:“They fly above the clouds! Above the clouds! And I’m flying above the clouds! I feel like an angel! I’m closer to heaven!” She was no longer a so-called “monster”. She felt like an angel. And I, too, felt closer to heaven.

My book,Closer to Heaven, published in English and Chinese by China Intercontinental Press, is the capstone of my life’s mission to contribute to and tell the story of China’s poverty-alleviation miracle from the front lines.

I plan to use the money that I earn from the book’s sales to continue to support nomadic children on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and, in particular, hope to provide a surgery for another girl who also has a severe cleft palate and deeper psychological problems as a result.

Readers can scan QR codes in the book to watch videos and mini-documentaries I’ve hosted about China’s poverty alleviation, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views in total.

It’s not your typical China book. I discover unexpected dimensions of China’s poverty alleviation while riding ostriches, visiting leprosy villages and exploring virtual-reality parks run by farmers. I talk about sexual rehabilitation with people left paralyzed by quakes,meet “Hero Pig” and eat horse intestines with an elderly nomad who hunts with eagles on horseback. I join the“bangbang army”, ride hogs with an elderly motorcycle club and much, much more.

These journeys have been adventures. They’ve brought me from the darkness of the quake zone toward the light, from the United States to the “roof of the world”and closer to heaven.

And they’ve been a firsthand exploration of how China,in turn, has lifted so many people from the hell that is poverty and closer to heaven, as it exists on this Earth.

China’s poverty alleviation is the story of the year. It’s the story of the decade. It’s the story of the century.

And I hope that, through my work over the past 14 years, and especially through my new book, I can help tell this story in a way that resonates with the world.