Holding Patterns: EARTHLY AND POLITICAL TIME AT CHINA’S DESERT SHORES

Ecologist Li Ming and forestry official Tian are standing with me in the footprint of Qingtu Lake.¹ Once the anchor of a verdant oasis of reedy wetlands in Gansu Province’s Minqin County, the lake today is an expanse of sand that extends past the horizon. As late as the 1950s, Qingtu Lake sprawled luxuriantly over four hundred square kilometers, sixty meters deep at its lowest point. In the span of decades, with groundwater drained in the utopian social-agricultural experiments of high Maoist socialism, the lake disappeared completely, leaving a carpet of mobile, alkaline sand. It swirls around our heels like