A Desert's Deadly Advance Strangles an Oasis

China's favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, surely would have warned against letting two mighty enemies, the Tengger and the Badain Jaran, form a united front. Yet a desert pincer is squeezing this struggling oasis town, and China's long campaign to cultivate its vast, arid northwest is now in retreat.

An ever-rising tide of sand has claimed grasslands, ponds, lakes and forests, swallowed whole villages and forced tens of thousands of people to flee as it surges south and threatens to render this ancient Silk Road greenbelt uninhabitable.

Han Chinese cover their heads and faces to protect against violent sandstorms. Farmers dig wells down hundreds of meters. If they find water, it is often brackish, even poisonous.

Chinese leaders have vowed to protect Minqin and surrounding towns in Gansu Province. The area divides two deserts, the Badain Jaran in the northwest and the Tengger in the northeast, and its precarious state threatens to accelerate the spread of barren wasteland to the heart of China.

The national "937 Project," set up to fight the encroaching desert, estimated in April that 3,900 square kilometers, or 1,500 square miles, of land turns to sand each year. Nearly all of north central China, including Beijing, is at risk. Expanding deserts and a severe drought also made this a near record year for dust storms carried east in the jet stream.

Sand squalls have blanketed Beijing and other northern cities, leaving a stubborn yellow haze in the air and coating roads, buildings, cars and lungs with a film of fine granules.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao traveled to the northwest recently, offering aid to drought-stricken farmers and ordering provincial officials to supply more water to Minqin. His call to reinforce the oasis is plastered on a giant billboard on the main road into town. But while local officials have tried grandiose schemes to rescue the outpost, environmentalists say that it will probably need to be at least partly abandoned and returned to nature if the regional ecology is to be restored.

"We must find ways to live with nature in some kind of balance," said Chai Erhong, an environmentalist and writer who lives in Minqin. "The government mainly wants to control nature, which is what did all the harm in the first place."

Government-led cultivation, deforestation, irrigation and reclamation almost certainly contributed to the desert's advance, which began in the 1950s and the 1960s and has accelerated since then.

Critics warn that some lessons of past engineering fiascoes remained unlearned. During the ill-fated Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered construction of a giant Hongyashan reservoir near Minqin that diverted the flow of the Shiyang River and runoff from the Qilian Mountains into an irrigation system. It briefly made Minqin's farmland fertile enough to grow grain. But Minqin is a desert oasis that gets almost no rainfall. The Shiyang and its offshoots had been its ecological lifeline.

With the available water resources monopolized for farming, nearly all other land became a target for the desert. Today, patches of farmland that cling to irrigation channels are emerald islands in a sea of beige.

Even the irrigated plots risk extinction. Competing reservoirs on the upper reaches of the Shiyang reduced its flow so severely by 2004 that the Hongyashan reservoir went dry for the first time since its creation in 1959. It was refilled after Beijing ordered an emergency diversion of water from the Yellow River, which itself now runs dry through much of the year.

Local officials, whose promotions in the government and Communist Party hierarchy depend more on increasing economic output than improving the environment, have tried desperately to preserve Minqin's farming. They have pleaded with cities on the upper reaches of the Shiyang to take less of its water.

They have also dug wells at a furious pace - 11,000 of them in total, some reaching more than 300 meters, or about 1,000 feet. Minqin also planted ramparts of Rose Willow, Sacsaoul and Buckthorn trees in a 300-kilometer Maginot Line along the Tengger and Badain Jaran fronts. They are now stranded by desert on two sides.

Such ideas have not worked. Wang Tao, who heads the 937 Project, said the only viable strategy to save arid land in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia was to move people out, reduce production, form conservation parks and let nature heal itself. "Minqin is not going to get more water," he said by telephone from his base in Lanzhou. "It needs fewer people."

In fact, a 200-year trend of migration into northern Gansu from overcrowded lands in south and central China has shifted sharply into reverse, with tens of thousands of farmers being relocated, some as far away as Heilongjiang Province in the northeast. Along Minqin's northern frontier, villages like Xiqu, Zhongqu, Shoucheng and Hongshaliang have been totally or partly abandoned. Sand dunes smother empty homes. Olive, plum and date trees are stacked for firewood.

Shen Tangguo reckons he is the only remaining farmer in his village, called Huanghui, that once had several hundred. He carries water by motorcycle from a well a few kilometers away to irrigate his cotton, which he says is resilient but low yielding. He has pictures of Mao and Zhou Enlai as well as more recent Chinese leaders on his walls. But he says he has not seen an official in Huanghui since someone dropped by to collect a road-building tax a few months ago.

"Everyone else left because they have friends who can arrange things," he said. "I don't have any friends."

Chai, the Minqin environmentalist, grew up north of the city in a village now struggling to survive. His father left the village a few years ago to live with Chai, who is 44. Their ancestral home now has two remaining walls and no roof. The local elementary school closed last year when only three children showed up for class.

The village's decline prompted Chai to study ecology on his own. He now speaks volubly about the desert ecosystem and writes newspaper and magazine articles calling on the higher authorities to abandon water engineering schemes so that his native land has a chance to recover. But he is not optimistic.

Just outside his village is a vast wind-whipped plain where, he said, his father used to fish. It was called Qingtu Lake, once one of the largest in China's northwest until the diversion of the Shiyang gave the lake to the Tengger. Fifteen centimeters down, the soil remains dark. And on the surface are shells, fish bones and a snowlike powder of mirabilite crystal left behind by the alkaline waters.

"This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made," Chai said. "And unless people study the lesson of Minqin, it will repeat itself clear across China."


MINQIN, China China's favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, surely would have warned against letting two mighty enemies, the Tengger and the Badain Jaran, form a united front. Yet a desert pincer is squeezing this struggling oasis town, and China's long campaign to cultivate its vast, arid northwest is now in retreat.

An ever-rising tide of sand has claimed grasslands, ponds, lakes and forests, swallowed whole villages and forced tens of thousands of people to flee as it surges south and threatens to render this ancient Silk Road greenbelt uninhabitable.

Han Chinese cover their heads and faces to protect against violent sandstorms. Farmers dig wells down hundreds of meters. If they find water, it is often brackish, even poisonous.

Chinese leaders have vowed to protect Minqin and surrounding towns in Gansu Province. The area divides two deserts, the Badain Jaran in the northwest and the Tengger in the northeast, and its precarious state threatens to accelerate the spread of barren wasteland to the heart of China.

The national "937 Project," set up to fight the encroaching desert, estimated in April that 3,900 square kilometers, or 1,500 square miles, of land turns to sand each year. Nearly all of north central China, including Beijing, is at risk. Expanding deserts and a severe drought also made this a near record year for dust storms carried east in the jet stream.

Sand squalls have blanketed Beijing and other northern cities, leaving a stubborn yellow haze in the air and coating roads, buildings, cars and lungs with a film of fine granules.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao traveled to the northwest recently, offering aid to drought-stricken farmers and ordering provincial officials to supply more water to Minqin. His call to reinforce the oasis is plastered on a giant billboard on the main road into town. But while local officials have tried grandiose schemes to rescue the outpost, environmentalists say that it will probably need to be at least partly abandoned and returned to nature if the regional ecology is to be restored.

"We must find ways to live with nature in some kind of balance," said Chai Erhong, an environmentalist and writer who lives in Minqin. "The government mainly wants to control nature, which is what did all the harm in the first place."

Government-led cultivation, deforestation, irrigation and reclamation almost certainly contributed to the desert's advance, which began in the 1950s and the 1960s and has accelerated since then.

Critics warn that some lessons of past engineering fiascoes remained unlearned. During the ill-fated Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered construction of a giant Hongyashan reservoir near Minqin that diverted the flow of the Shiyang River and runoff from the Qilian Mountains into an irrigation system. It briefly made Minqin's farmland fertile enough to grow grain. But Minqin is a desert oasis that gets almost no rainfall. The Shiyang and its offshoots had been its ecological lifeline.

With the available water resources monopolized for farming, nearly all other land became a target for the desert. Today, patches of farmland that cling to irrigation channels are emerald islands in a sea of beige.

Even the irrigated plots risk extinction. Competing reservoirs on the upper reaches of the Shiyang reduced its flow so severely by 2004 that the Hongyashan reservoir went dry for the first time since its creation in 1959. It was refilled after Beijing ordered an emergency diversion of water from the Yellow River, which itself now runs dry through much of the year.

Local officials, whose promotions in the government and Communist Party hierarchy depend more on increasing economic output than improving the environment, have tried desperately to preserve Minqin's farming. They have pleaded with cities on the upper reaches of the Shiyang to take less of its water.

They have also dug wells at a furious pace - 11,000 of them in total, some reaching more than 300 meters, or about 1,000 feet. Minqin also planted ramparts of Rose Willow, Sacsaoul and Buckthorn trees in a 300-kilometer Maginot Line along the Tengger and Badain Jaran fronts. They are now stranded by desert on two sides.

Such ideas have not worked. Wang Tao, who heads the 937 Project, said the only viable strategy to save arid land in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia was to move people out, reduce production, form conservation parks and let nature heal itself. "Minqin is not going to get more water," he said by telephone from his base in Lanzhou. "It needs fewer people."

In fact, a 200-year trend of migration into northern Gansu from overcrowded lands in south and central China has shifted sharply into reverse, with tens of thousands of farmers being relocated, some as far away as Heilongjiang Province in the northeast. Along Minqin's northern frontier, villages like Xiqu, Zhongqu, Shoucheng and Hongshaliang have been totally or partly abandoned. Sand dunes smother empty homes. Olive, plum and date trees are stacked for firewood.

Shen Tangguo reckons he is the only remaining farmer in his village, called Huanghui, that once had several hundred. He carries water by motorcycle from a well a few kilometers away to irrigate his cotton, which he says is resilient but low yielding. He has pictures of Mao and Zhou Enlai as well as more recent Chinese leaders on his walls. But he says he has not seen an official in Huanghui since someone dropped by to collect a road-building tax a few months ago.

"Everyone else left because they have friends who can arrange things," he said. "I don't have any friends."

Chai, the Minqin environmentalist, grew up north of the city in a village now struggling to survive. His father left the village a few years ago to live with Chai, who is 44. Their ancestral home now has two remaining walls and no roof. The local elementary school closed last year when only three children showed up for class.

The village's decline prompted Chai to study ecology on his own. He now speaks volubly about the desert ecosystem and writes newspaper and magazine articles calling on the higher authorities to abandon water engineering schemes so that his native land has a chance to recover. But he is not optimistic.

Just outside his village is a vast wind-whipped plain where, he said, his father used to fish. It was called Qingtu Lake, once one of the largest in China's northwest until the diversion of the Shiyang gave the lake to the Tengger. Fifteen centimeters down, the soil remains dark. And on the surface are shells, fish bones and a snowlike powder of mirabilite crystal left behind by the alkaline waters.

"This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made," Chai said. "And unless people study the lesson of Minqin, it will repeat itself clear across China."

By Joseph Kahn The New York TimesPublished: June 7, 2006