Yellow River goes green to get clean

Change of focus

The 5,464-kilometer Yellow River traverses the Loess Plateau, whose steep inclines produce rapid water flow.

The loose soil, broken terrain, long-term erosion of the steep slopes and excessive logging led to severe vegetation loss and resulted in large amounts of the loess soil being washed into the river during rainy periods. It turned the water yellow, giving the river its name.

Shaanxi is located on the waterway's middle reaches. Once, serious soil erosion not only endangered the safety of people living further downstream on the lower reaches, but also hampered the development of the province.

"Water and soil conservation in Shaanxi have always played an important role in China's history," said Cao Hongxing, deputy head of Yichuan. He noted that an average 9.5 million metric tons of sediment were washed into the river every year in the 1980s, trapping the people of Yichuan in a harsh, poverty-stricken environment.

"It could be said that environmental fragility was a major factor in us being left behind in terms of economic and social development at that time," he recalled.

The situation was similar in Wuqi, a county in Yan'an about three hours from Yichuan by road.

"The air was so dusty that when I was young, I dared not wear a white shirt. No matter how clean it was, it would be covered with dirt soon after I went out," Yan Zhixiong, a local resident, said.

To remedy the situation and beautify the mountains and rivers in China's northwestern region, Yan'an took the lead in a nationwide program introduced by the central leadership in the late 1990s to return farmland to forests.

Both Lan and Yan recalled that it wasn't easy to convince the villagers to plant trees initially, because many people were reluctant to change their lifestyle.

"Lots of people couldn't feed themselves due to the bad environment and poor farmland, so some were worried they would have no food to eat if they planted trees instead of crops," Yan said.

He added that his frequent trips around the county meant he saw the scale of the problem and thus found it easier to accept the idea of planting trees.

"I knew that those who wanted to change their lives would have to change their conservative attitudes first," the 57-year-old said.

As a result, he took pains to talk with other villagers and explain the benefits of planting trees, telling them that governments at all levels would provide subsidies and food. He also encouraged the people to go outside to work and see the wider world.

As the Party chief of Zanjiashan village at the time, Lan persuaded some friends to take the lead in planting trees and he also visited each family to show them how the move would help them live better lives.

In 1998, those efforts saw Wuqi become the first county in China where the mountains were declared off-limits to ramblers and animal grazing was forbidden. A year later, the large-scale conversion of farmland into forests started across Yan'an.

After many years of environmental restoration work on the plateau and the river, Yan'an's greenbelt has developed continuously.

The vegetation coverage has risen to 81.3 percent from 46 percent more than 20 years ago, while the volume of sediment entering the river every year has fallen from 258 million tons to 31 million tons, a drop of 88 percent, Cao said.