Road to eco-ruin

As Labour Day holidaymakers clog roads leading to Beijing's eco-tourism zoned Huairou district stalled in carbon dioxide, they will compare who has the latest Audi, BMW or Mercedes models, but will see little wildlife because eco-tourism has degenerated.

Guandi village in Yanxi township within Huairou is a screaming example of eco-tourism gone bad. 'There once were deer in those mountains,' said an old party secretary with a grin. 'Then we killed them all, each and every one of them!'

'What for, the meat?'

'No. Just to kill them,' he smiled again.

During the Cultural Revolution, Guandi was a gulag where intellectuals were tortured. The old party secretary must have been a ringleader. Today his farm house has huge television screens, the finest in electronic equipment worthy of China's present ideology of conspicuous consumption. But despite his fancy products showing his new wealth, he uses a squat toilet in a pit within a pigsty. He defecates with the pigs, but watches the latest imported porn. A few houses down the vice dens full of prostitutes, karaoke and crack give this weekend vacation village its real income.

Particularly disturbing is how Guandi villagers continue to destroy the environment and kill animals. There seems to be some joy in watching them suffer - a kind of psycho appeal. A regular pleasure is to place electric cables hooked to batteries in riverbeds. Since water conducts electricity, all the fish are killed. Many are too small to eat, so why kill them? For fun. The violence does not stop there. Pet dogs are stolen to be tortured. They smash ducks with rocks, torture cats and love to inflict pain.

'You don't understand our people,' said a local Beijing resident. 'We have no religion, no values, no belief in the future, only worshipping money for the moment. So when these guys have nothing to do they kill and torture animals, it is a kind of new decadent entertainment.'