Hebei to plant 100 million trees to block sand storms

About 100 million trees will be planted by volunteers this year in Hebei Province to increase forest coverage and block sand storms from reaching Beijing and Tianjin, Hebei provincial forestry authorities told the Global Times on Monday, the day before China’s 35th Tree Planting Day.

Over the past five years, about 30 million local volunteers including government employees, soldiers and students have planted 100 million trees each year, said an employee surnamed Ren from the office of the Hebei Provincial Afforestation and Greening Committee.

Planting trees in Hebei Province is very significant to Beijing and Tianjin municipalities, which suffer from frequent sand storms, according to Tang Xiaoping, a vice dean of the Academy of Forest Inventory and Planning under the State Forestry Administration (SFA).

Beijing and Tianjin are surrounded by Hebei Province, which is a major source of sand storms, Tang said.

Before 2006, deserts accounted for 12.81 percent of the total area of the province, according to the Hebei Provincial Forestry Department, China News Service (CNS) reported Monday. Deserts now cover 11.34 percent of the province.

A series of projects has reduced deserts by 278,000 hectares, a Hebei forestry official was quoted as saying in the CNS report.

In 2012 alone, 648 tree planting bases totaling 13,133  hectares had been established in Hebei, CNS reported.

Across the country, 600 million volunteers planted 2,600 million trees in 2012, SFA announced on Monday.

Heavy sand storms hit Beijing and Tianjin municipalities and Qinghai and Hebei provinces on Saturday.

AIR POLLUTION: Forecast to clear up

Shanghai’s air quality is very up and down, but mainly down! School children have recently spent days ‘locked’ in their classroom due to increasingly suffocating air outdoors -it’s ‘not’ so much about education outside the classroom, but rather keeping kids sane indoors….  

Shanghai’s air quality will improve Monday as strong winds continue to disperse the pollution that settled on the city last week, the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center predicted Sunday.

Source:
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/767142.shtml#.UT3tqByou8A

The city’s Air Quality Index (AQI) peaked at 166 at 3 am Sunday, indicating a moderate level of pollution. The main pollutant then was PM 2.5, or particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter, according to the monitoring center.

The AQI subsequently fell as a cold front blew into the city from the north, bringing stronger winds but also sand particles that prevented the air quality from improving very much, said Zhao Qianbiao, a monitor with the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center.

By 1 pm, the air quality was considered lightly polluted, with PM 10 accounting for most of the pollution. Besides sand particles, coal soot is the primary source of PM 10, Zhao said. PM 10 doesn’t penetrate the lungs like PM 2.5 does, but it usually irritates the eyes and nasal passages.

PM 10 is harmful when its 24-hour reading surpasses 150 micrograms per cubic meter, according to Zhao. The PM 10 reading peaked around 200 early Sunday morning, according to the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center.

Zhao advised children and residents with heart and respiratory illnesses to cut back on outdoor activities and wear masks when they go outdoors.

The wind arrived in the city with Saturday night’s cold front, Zhao said.

The high temperature plunged to 11 C Sunday, down from 29.5 C on Saturday, which was the highest temperature on that date in 100 years, according to the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau.

The high temperature will range from 10 C to 19 C from Monday to Thursday and the low temperature will range from 5 C to 8 C.

The city will experience rain showers on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, the weather bureau said.

 

Pollution China : Beijing is left fighting for breath….

Shanghai from the Jin Mao Tower (Photo credit: thewamphyri)

In Shanghai, you cannot see the buildings.

The locals are wearing masks again and here is why ….

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/beijing-is-left-fighting-for-breath-as-pollution-goes-off-the-scale-8471743.html

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Chinese air pollution hits record levels – in pictures

Beijing smog as seen from the China World Hotel, March 2003, during the SARS outbreak. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Saturday, Beijing experienced its worst pollution reading since the air quality monitor on was installed in the US embassy in 2008. Until this year, Chinese authorities have underplayed the country’s spells of noxious atmospheric pollution. This weekend, however, Beijing’s local government issued an alert, warning vulnerable people to stay indoors. The wave of pollution peaked on Saturday and by Monday remained hazardous. It is expected to last until Tuesday

Click here for pictures from The Guardian

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Unnatural Disaster that China would rather forget

English: A queue to enter Mao Zedong Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. Polski: Kolejka oczekujących na wejście do mauzoleum Mao Zedonga w Pekinie. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng – From the International Herald Tribune

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”

TOMBSTONE

The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

By Yang Jisheng

Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian

629 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

There are good earlier studies of the famine and one excellent recent one, “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but Yang’s is significant because he lives in China and is boldly unsparing. Mao’s rule, he writes, “became a secular theocracy. . . . Divergence from Mao’s views was heresy. . . . Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of totalitarianism.” This political system, he argues, “caused the degeneration of the national character of the Chinese people.”

Yang, who was born in 1940, is a well-known veteran journalist and a Communist Party member. Before I quote the following sentence, remember that a huge portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the main gate into Beijing’s Forbidden City and can be seen from every corner of Tiananmen Square, where his embalmed body lies in an elaborate mausoleum. Despite this continued public veneration, Yang looks squarely at the real chairman: “In power, Mao became immersed in China’s traditional monarchal culture and Lenin and Stalin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ . . . When Mao was provided with a list of slogans for his approval, he personally added one: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao.’ ” Two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Ian Johnson, Yang remarked that he views the famine “as part of the totalitarian system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao.”

From the early 1990s, Yang writes, he began combing normally closed official archives containing confidential reports of the ravages of the famine, and reading accounts of the official killing of protesters. He found references to cannibalism and interviewed men and women who survived by eating human flesh.

Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and “greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists, “outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang..

The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang’s narrative relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province. A lush region, it was “the economic engine of the province,” with a population in 1958 of 8.5 million. Mao’s policies had driven the peasants from their individual small holdings; working communally, they were now forced to yield almost everything to the state, either to feed the cities or — crazily — to increase exports. The peasants were allotted enough grain for just a few months. In Xinyang alone, Yang calculates, over a million people died

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in China.

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