Green Great Wall

Seeking support

During the early stages of tree-planting projects in Zhangbei, poplar was settled on as the best choice of tree to use.

"Poplars can be rooted easily using cuttings and they grow quickly, making them ideal for local farmers to plant," Yuan said.

Wang Jinhuan, Deputy Director of Zhangbei's Forestry Bureau, said that out of the county's 1,090 square km of windbreaks, around 670 square km consist of pines, elms and sea-buckthorns that were planted after the conversion of some farmlands into forests started in 2000, while all of the remaining 420 square km of trees are all poplars.

According to statistics from the local government, the annual number of gales hitting the county, the average speed of winds and the number of days with sandstorms have all decreased dramatically while the county's relative humidity and frost-free periods have grown substantially. These factors would indicate that Zhangbei's natural environment has improved enormously as a result of the forestation programs that have been implemented over the past four decades.

Beijing has been long plagued by sandstorms that hit the city every spring, prompting many to wear face masks amid the red and brown gloom. The sand makes its way down from the deserts in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, including the Gobi, and can often block the sun for hours at a time. The earliest records of sandstorms in Beijing date back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), when historical documents tell of a storm in 1367 that lasted for 43 consecutive days.

According to the China Meteorological Administration, in terms of the length of sandstorms annually, Beijing was hit by the worst sandstorms in the 1950s. Over the past four decades, the days of dusty weather in Beijing have been dropping annually in general. This could be attributed to the successful shelterbelt programs conducted by people like Yuan.

However, such promising reductions in sandstorms affecting and sourced from Bashang could be undercut by the large-scale death of poplar trees in counties with manmade forests. Wang told Beijing-based Legal Evening News that most of Bashang's poplar forests were planted in the 1960s and 1970s and around 30 percent of them are dying or dead at this time. Forestry experts have identified dwindling underground water resources and trees' natural aging as the main causes.

Lu Mengzhu, a renowned poplar expert from the Research Institute of Forestry of the Chinese Academy of Forestry, told Beijing Review that poplar trees living in harsh environments will often die prematurely. He said that insect infestations used to be a major cause of death for poplar trees in north China until a team he headed successfully developed genetically insect-resistant poplars a few years ago.

Yuan began to notice the withering of poplars in large numbers back in 2003, the year she was elected a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), the country's top legislature.

During her two five-year terms as a lawmaker, Yuan submitted motions at every annual NPC full session calling for subsidies to be granted to replace the dead trees in Bashang. Since her second term began in 2008, she started to hand in her proposals and advice to the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as Bashang's forest update programs were being hindered by lack of funding. All four counties in Bashang are part of the national poverty reduction program and the local governments could not afford to replace all of the dead trees without support.

Yuan's calls have received attention in media outlets and attracted the attention of various government departments. In April, the Hebei Provincial Government launched a trial project for revitalizing 6.67 square km of poplar forests in Bashang: replacing dead trees with Scots pines and sea-buckthorns and replacing dying trees with their own branch cuttings. The provincial government paid 4 million yuan (US$656,000) for the project while the remaining 6 million yuan (US$984,000) was raised by local governments.

In early September, Wang told The Beijing News that the project showed promising results in Zhangbei as 95 percent of newly planted trees had survived and some poplar cuttings had grown to an average of 1 meter tall.

The NDRC has also conducted research so as to draw up a program to fund the replacement of trees in Bashang, which is scheduled to begin soon.