The Fiery Breath Of Black Dragon

June 05, 1989|By Reviewed by John Maxwell Hamilton.

The Great Black Dragon Fire:

A Chinese Inferno

By Harrison E. Salisbury

Little, Brown, 180 pages, $17.95

`As if in frantic rage at invasion of his forest kingdom, the Black Dragon had turned on those whom it was his duty to guard and, with a gust of fiery breath, wiped it all out: men, women, children, animals, birds, trees.`` Thus, indefatigable journalist Harrison Salisbury sums up the consequences of a 1987 forest fire which, he reckons, was the greatest conflagration of its kind in China`s last 300 years, if not in all of world history.

The conifer-rich Black Dragon Forest lies in the remote northwestern corner of China, where it extends well into the Soviet Union. Although the fire burned an area almost the size of New England, it has received only scant attention outside of China until now. Salisbury, an octogenarian who earned a reputation for dogged, competitive reporting overseas for the New York Times, arrived in China several months after the fire to gather material for a book on Chinese economic reforms. Hearing about the devastation and sensing a big story, he persuaded the Chinese to let him investigate.

The resulting slim book, Salisbury`s twenty-fifth, is reminiscent of John Hersey`s chronicle of the American bombing that ended World War II,

``Hiroshima.`` Both are detailed and rely on extensive interviews; both tell of horrible devastation, for which human beings are ultimately responsible.

According to the popular Chinese rendition, the fire started when an untrained 18-year-old worker accidentally ignited gas spilled from his brush- cutter. In fact, a series of fires broke out over an extended period on both sides of the Sino-Soviet border during an unusually dry period.

The chief culprit, as Salisbury sees it, was not any single person but people. The relentless cutting of trees, without parallel measures to protect and rejuvenate the forest, made the Black Dragon vulnerable.

Winds whipped the Black Dragon fire far afield. The flaming monster hurled burning projectiles in its path. It sucked oxygen out of the air, making truck engines stop. When the fire was quenched a month after it began, the death toll was more than 200. The fire, Salisbury concludes, wiped out

``at least one third of China`s principal reserve of first-class timber.``

The book frequently jumps back and forth between the fire and the people and places the blaze touched. If the narrative sometimes advances awkwardly, the vignettes are vivid real-life glimpses of modern China.

``I had never been so moved by a story,`` Salisbury claims, ``not even the blitz of London or Leningrad after the siege.`` But ever the journalistic skeptic, he found contradictions in the story of one official hero, the PR-oriented commander of a military division credited with stopping the fire in one sector.

Salisbury`s hero is a cool-headed woman mayor who came to the region as a member of the militant Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Although 57 residents of her town died in the fire, her good judgment and tirelessness kept the disaster from being worse. Nevertheless, she was sacked.

As is typical of governments everywhere, the tendency was to blame mishaps on individuals rather than anything systemic. The forestry minister lost his job. The young brush-cutter and the man who hired him went to jail. And a deserved four-year sentence went to a fire chief who saved his house while the rest of the town burned.)