Taming a desert to plant roots of stability

XI’AN — Over 60 years ago, a sandstorm blew Shi Guangyin more than 15 kilometers off his chosen track while he was on his way to herd goats. Shi was lucky enough to be rescued by herdsmen but his friend lost his life.

“His body perhaps got buried somewhere under the sand,” says Shi, 69, choking with emotion as he recalls those distressing moments from his childhood.

Shi, from Yulin city, Northwest China’s Shaanxi province, located on the edges of the Maowusu Desert, shares wearily familiar grief with many others living in the area.

Maowusu, a major desert in China, stretches from Ordos in North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region to Yulin. Its name comes from Mongolian, meaning “bad water”, and rightly so as the desert contains vast stretches of wasteland with oases of saline-alkali water.

Since the Qin Dynasty (221206 BC), Yulin, a former oasis with a warm and humid climate, has been ravaged by numerous ancient wars and marred by the expanding desertification of the nearby Maowusu, with the increasingly dry climate making it worse. “The desertification of Maowusu is a result of both climate change and human activities,” says Wang Lirong, deputy director of Yulin’s Forestry and Grassland Bureau.

In June 1949, the forest and grass coverage rate in Yulin was only about 1.8 percent. All rivers in the sandy area were turbid all year round, transporting 190 million tons of sand annually to the Yellow River.

Memories of the great scourges brought by the past sandstorms, which scattered flocks of sheep, overwhelmed farmland, choked wells and destroyed houses, are still fresh on Shi’s mind.

In the 1950s, China began to promote forest conservation nationwide and started largescale afforestation. In 1981, the local government of Yulin allocated wasteland, including barren hills, sandy beaches, slopes and ditches to individuals for long-term use and promised that the trees they planted on the wasteland belonged to them.

Shi was in the prime of his life back then and took the lead to become China’s first contractor planting trees in the barren desert in a bid to curb sandstorms.

He sold almost all of his property, including a mule and 84 sheep, to fund his new career. Shi also encouraged more than 300 fellow villagers to “march into Maowusu for a greener future”.

However, only a 10th of the initial saplings survived. “This came as a disappointment for some and they abandoned the work. But for me, I would rather die in the desert than quit,” Shi says.

The following year, Shi made several trips to consult experts in other cities. In 1988, over 80 percent of his trees survived the harsh environment in Maowusu. In a few years, it witnessed the formation of its first oasis.

Statistics show that about 440,000 farmers like Shi in Yulin have taken more than 600,000 hectares of wasteland on lease over the decades.

Satellite remote sensing imagery helped identify the changes to the city’s vegetation coverage over the past two decades. The yellow color of sand has been gradually replaced with green plants.

Yulin is the country’s first “forest city” among the arid and semiarid sandy areas. After a few decades, its forest coverage has increased from 0.9 percent to 34.8 percent. A total of 573,000 hectares of quicksand has been fixed or semi-fixed while large areas of exposed sand can barely be seen.

Nowadays, some tourists looking for the desert may feel disappointed as the once vast Maowusu has almost disappeared from Yulin. Reflecting on his and the project’s success, Shi says with a laugh: “I should have reserved a little sand for the tourists.”