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Mark O'Neill

A PROFESSOR has paid a heavy price for revealing that illegal logging was taking place in one of China's biggest natural forests - the granite mine he owns has been destroyed by lumber workers who lost their jobs.

 It is a cautionary tale of trying to balance a personal benefit against the national interest - and the do-gooder may well end up the loser.

 Wei Yunlong is a professor of natural sciences who, after returning from studies in Japan, decided to set up a company to tap the funds of Chinese students abroad who wanted to help their country's economy.

 He wrote a letter to President Jiang Zemin and received the support of the State Education Commission, which donated 600,000 yuan (HK$560,000).

 He attracted an additional 3.2 million yuan from students in the United States, Canada, Japan and Singapore and set up the Chongqing Long Teng Group.

 The company used the money to buy a mine with 50 million cubic metres of granite in Hongya county, a poor, remote region in western Sichuan.

 To get it up and running, the company had to build a road through the mountains. Production began last year when they posted a small profit.

 Local officials and villagers were delighted at this new source of employment and revenue in an area dependent on agriculture and timber.

 Hongya has the fourth largest natural forest in China with an area of 72,000 hectares. Ninety per cent of the trees are more than 100 years old.

 It is one of the principal barriers preventing the flow of soil into the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.

 After devastating flooding this summer, the Government imposed a ban on logging in natural forests taking effect from September 1. But Professor Wei heard that loggers in Hongya were ignoring the ban. Alarmed, he invited a crew from Central Television to go with him to the area, an eight-hour drive from Chongqing, in September.

 When they arrived, their suspicions were confirmed. In three places, they saw wide-scale logging, with what had been growing for hundreds of years felled in three minutes with a diesel saw.

 'My heart bled when I saw it. This was the gift of our ancestors to us. If all these trees are cut down, that is the end for China,' he said.

 Professor Wei posed as a buyer of timber and the television crew as his assistants. They filmed secretly while he openly used a camcorder, saying that he needed pictures to convince shareholders of Hongya's good timber.

 'The lumbermen told us that they planned intensive cutting over the next three weeks. They had heard of the ban but officials of the county government had not told them they had to stop logging,' he said.

 On September 29, Central Television broadcast a prime-time report of the Hongya logging. The effect was electric.

 Deeply embarrassed, the Sichuan Government announced a province-wide ban on logging in natural forests from October 1 and sent officials to Beijing to try to explain why the September ban had been ignored.

 The National Forestry Bureau and Ministry of Finance sent teams to Hongya to investigate.

 In Hongya, however, the response was revenge, because the ban put 1,000 loggers out of work and meant an annual loss of 10 million yuan in revenue to the county government.

 Officials organised teams to attack Professor Wei's mine. They drove away its 30 staff and used dynamite to blow it up. Then they started removing the granite for resale. Professor Wei's associates in Chongqing received threatening telephone calls.

 'They have taken over the mine illegally and we are losing about 9,000 yuan a day,' said Professor Wei. 'We demand compensation for what we have lost and the return of our mining rights. No one dares to go to Hongya. Maybe they are still doing the illegal logging.

 'How do I explain this to my shareholders who have invested their precious savings in this project? Most are supportive, seeing they need to save our environment, but some say they cannot understand what we did. But I do not regret anything.' 



Professor targeted over his TV exposure of illegal logging trade in precious