Law enforcement must be intensified, agreed He Shuzhong. That means making conservation of the Great Wall part of a government official's assessment, ranked on his official record. Government departments like human resources and discipline supervision should get in on the act, He said.

    Greater publicity is needed to educate people, helping them understand the great value of the Great Wall and the severe, irrecoverable damage inflicted upon it by humans, said Dong Yaohui. He depicts the damage as coming in two waves of destruction since the founding of New China in 1949: The first wave hit between the 1950s and 1980s, when governments throughout China encouraged and even organized the dismantling of the Wall. Since then, he suggested, destruction has been largely nongovernmental.

    Dong Yaohui recalled from a recent survey he had conducted that one farmer pointed at the Great Wall and asked, "What's the use of this stuff?" Dong suspects that in some underdeveloped rural regions, peasants continue to pilfer bricks from the Wall to build roads, houses and pigsties. One section of the Great Wall in Wanquan county, Zhangjiakou had been converted into a 1,000-plus meter ditch before local media attention ended the digging. Amateur renovation often does more harm than good. And "restored" Great Wall gleams, like the infamous section at Bai Yangyu in Hebei Province. "Just short of putting a porcelain coat on it," Dong said.

    "Too often people see only the exploitable value of the Great Wall and not its historical value," said Dong. The rare cases where the Wall has been well-preserved, he said, came about either because it was in a remote, treacherous area or because that particular section was associated with mystic tales of revenge-seeking demons.

    Dong Yaohui has been with China Great Wall Society since its inauguration in June 1987. First as secretary general, now executive vice president, he has spent almost two decades calling for Great Wall preservation.

    While much of his publicity efforts focus on promoting ethical conduct among tourists, Dong said he believed many amateur graffiti artists were well aware of their wrongdoing. On Badaling Great Wall, most graffiti is in Chinese, but there are occasional notes in Indian, Japanese and Korean. And the messages themselves suggest that many of the vandals are university students, professors even.

    In a country where many much more serious illegal acts go unpunished, the deterrence value of any law seeking to punish vandals is inevitably compromised, said one observer, who declined to be identified.

    The vandals and the conservationists form only tiny minorities, said Dong. When it comes to the Great Wall, the vast majority of the population remains indifferent. Most people witnessing carving take it for granted, he said, and the media did not consider it an issue. Dong called on people who laud the Great Wall as the symbol of Chinese pride to honor their grandiose statements and sentiments.

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