Millions of workers have spent half a century pushing forearm-length sticks into shifting sand across the deserts in northern China, building the grid that props up the country’s so-called Green Great Wall. The method is called “straw checkerboards.” It’s simple, repetitive, and brutally physical. Saplings go in at the center of each square, and irrigation keeps them alive while the wind keeps trying to tear the whole thing apart.
That’s the real engine behind the campaign: labor, planning, and state money. The Three-North Protective Forest Program, launched in 1978, has become the signature image of China’s fight against desertification, but the work has never been some neat, self-running miracle. It depends on people at the bottom doing the same task over and over while officials and scientists talk about “restoration” from above.
Who Does the Work
Yin Yuzhen, 60, described her early days as a sand-control worker as “very lonely.” Speaking during a government-organized media tour to a corner of Kubuqi Desert, about 800 kilometers west of Beijing, she said that working near her hometown in the neighboring Mu Us desert once felt so isolated that “even the passing of a bird across the sky made me happy.” That’s the human cost hidden inside the green rhetoric.
Four decades ago, Yin recalled, the sand blew so thick that it was hard to see a short distance. “But now we can see the sun. We can see the green in the distance. We can see the road,” she said. She and her husband now work from dawn to noon every day, attending to trees and fixing or replacing checkerboards. Their children help sometimes, and local volunteers join in as well. Zhu Jiaojun, a scientist at the Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated that over 300 million rural laborers have been involved in the program, mostly on a paid, part-time basis.
That’s a vast workforce. It’s also a reminder that the state’s celebrated environmental campaign rests on the hands of rural people, not on slogans.
What the State Claims
The Chinese government said the initiative has transformed vast regions covering nearly half of China from “the desertification advancing and people retreating” to “greenery advancing and the desertification retreating.” According to data published by state media, the area of desertified land in northern China peaked in 2000 and has been reduced by over 1,000 square kilometers each year since then. Forests planted by the program now cover a cumulative 500,000 square kilometers.
Zhu said the progress comes from “frontline sand-control workers, along with top-level planning and substantial state investment.” He also said increased rainfall in recent years in some areas has made vegetation restoration easier. “The achievement of desertification combat is due to people’s hard work and a bit of luck with climate,” he said.
That mix matters. The state gets the credit. Workers get the labor. Weather gets a share of the praise too.
What Still Holds It Together
Barron Joseph Orr, chief scientist for the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, said the “broad significance” of the Three-North Program lies not only in the scale of restoration, but in the “long-term political commitment behind it.” In a response to The Associated Press, he wrote that reversing desertification is possible when it becomes part of long-term development strategies. Elsewhere, efforts to combat desertification have included a project launched in Africa in 2007 to plant trees across a number of countries to hold back the Sahara Desert.
Orr also said restored ecosystems in drylands can become increasingly self-sustaining over time, but they still require careful management and long-term monitoring, with success depending on water availability and soil health. That’s the catch. The system needs constant tending, constant oversight, constant intervention. Nothing about it runs free.
Zhu said the key question is how conservation can be sustained if the scale of human intervention and investment is reduced. “This is what we are very concerned with and this is also the biggest challenge,” he said.
The environmental advocacy group Green Camel Bell in Gansu province works to explain desertification and its risks to farmers and herders, plant trees with them in dryland areas, and help restore and sustain vegetation. Its founder, Zhao Zhong, said, “Efforts to combat desertification and restore forests should be linked to local livelihoods, so communities do not see economic development and ecological protection as an either-or choice.” Orr agreed that restoration efforts have a much greater chance of succeeding if they’re structured to help communities benefit economically.
Yin hopes younger people keep going. “We need to teach young people to love this Earth. If we love it with all our hearts, nature will love us in return,” she said. The work goes on, checkerboard by checkerboard, under the watch of the state and the weight of the sand.