By Gong Yidong of China Features

    BEIJING, June 17 (Xinhua) -- Less than two hundred kilometers north of Beijing, a vast sandland called Hunshandake stretches endlessly into central Inner Mongolia. From this region in the 13th century sprung Genghis Khan's legendary Mongol marauders and his grandson Kublai Khan who founded the Yuan Dynasty. In their day Hunshandake was "a sandland glistening with gold" surrounded by the waving grasses of the steppe.

    In the last two decades, as the effects of inappropriate land use practices have accumulated, the 5.3-million-hectare sandland has become the crucible of many of Beijing's notorious sandstorms, prompting the former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji to ruefully nickname the area Hundan dake, literally "bastard dake".

    Now, a pilot program led by Jiang Gaoming, a researcher of ecology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is seeking to restore the ancient equilibrium by charting a new path in tune with nature that challenges much received thinking about how to deal with desertification.

    Ecological Conservation (not equal to) Tree Planting

    Along with Horqin, Mu Us and Hulun Buir, Hunshandake is one of the four biggest sandlands in China, all of which are located in Inner Mongolia, covering a space of 15 million hectares, or equivalent to 60% of UK territory.

    When Nasen Wuritu, a herdsman from Bayinhushuo Gacha (village),Zhenglan Banner (county) in the heart of Hunshandake, recalled the terrible sandstorms that occurred from 1997 to 2001, his voice was bitter.

    "When the sandstorm blew in, the sky turned dark yellow. Cattlegot lost, we couldn't find them. I had to fasten the windows of the tent and turn on a kerosene lamp even though it was daytime," lamented the 50-year-old.

    The sandstorms contrasted sharply with Wuritu's memories of the "good old days". When he was ten, the grass grew right up to "the withers of a robust horse". Home to more than 800 advanced plant species and five habitats -- fixed dunes, semi-fixed dunes, shifting dunes, lowland and wetland -- Hunshandake resembled an African Savannah landscape, rich in elms, grasses, lakes, wild geese and wolves. The other name of ecologically-diverse Hunshandake is "temperate Savannah".

    Large-scale degradation of Hunshandake began in the 1990s, when the local Mongolian herdsmen abandoned nomadic life and settled down in permanent houses. In 1995, every villager was allotted 23 hectares of grassland.

    Livestock numbers swelled to meet the demands of a bigger population and changed living habits. In a short space of time in Xilin Gol League (city), the upper administration governing Zhenglan Banner, the number of livestock skyrocketed from 10 million to 23 million.

    But over-grazing exacted a very heavy toll: by 2000, some 80% of the grasslands in Hunshandake had deteriorated into sandy, desert-like land, and 33% of the land had become mobile sand dunes-- up from less than 2% in the 1960s. The figures mirrored the increased frequency of sandstorms. There was only one recorded sandstorm from 1930 to 1960, then one every two years in the 1960s,but in 2000 there were fourteen. A significant indicator of sandland degradation, according to Wuritu, was the disappearance of the wolf, "king of the grassland".

    In 2000, Jiang Gaoming and other researchers chose a 2670-hectare grassland in Hunshandake -- one third of the grasslands in Bayinhushuo Gacha -- to experiment a new approach to restoration. The grassland was fenced off and no grazing was allowed.

    Initially, Jiang and his team planted 100,000 yuan (13,000 U.S. dollars) worth of willows on the degraded land, because "conventional thinking held that planting trees is the best solution for curbing desertification and sandstorms". It is true. Every year, the Chinese government invested a huge amount of money on planting trees in sandy grassland areas. For instance, Xilin Gol League received 500 million yuan (65 million U.S. dollars) in 2002 for reforestation and airplane seeding projects.

    To foster the growth of willows, Jiang even used a root hormone, only to find that all the trees withered and died in a year's time. In a semi-arid area with less than 300 mm in annual precipitation, the trees were like "water-pumping machines" and the sandland simply could not sustain them, he found.

    Pushing his observations further, Jiang concluded that the planted trees could not stem the sandstorms. Poplars are the trees most commonly planted under the Three North Forest Shelterbelt Project, but the sand dunes have continued to advance right through the middle of stands of poplars.

    In 1978, the Chinese government embarked on a 73-year-long forestation project in northeast, north and northwest China, covering four million square kilometers, with the aim of halting desertification. Back then, the slogan was "let's march toward desertification and turn the country green". Over the past three decades, the central government has spent billions of yuan on this project. But Jiang is far from convinced.

    "In some areas of Inner Mongolia, the goal is simply to plant trees, irrespective of whether or not those trees can survive. Money is being poured into tree-planting and so it carries on whether it is successful or not," said the outspoken Jiang.

    In Xilin Gol League, despite large-scale tree planting, forest coverage is still less than 1%, nearly half of which is primary elm forests. "What has happened to the trees they planted? The reality is that most of them have died", Jiang said. The overall survival rate of trees in the designated Three North areas is less than 25%, he found.

    Facing an uncomfortable truth and unwilling to repeat the mistakes of the past, Jiang and his team shifted their focus away from re-forestation and opted for a new strategy of "nurturing the land by the land itself". To supplement the loss of forage resulting from grassland fencing, they used 67 hectares of land adjacent to the fenced area as a forage base that produced high-yield corn. Meanwhile, the 2670-hectare grassland was left to mend all by itself.