In recent years, China got much more attention because of its magnificent development. However, at the same, in many ways China's environmental problems have already reached catastrophic levels. Among them, desertification is a significant issue.
Status Quo
According to the research, about 28 percent of China is covered by desert and that amount of desert in China is getting larger every year, just 7% of Chinese land feeds about a quarter of the world's population. Deserts are being created faster in China than anywhere else in the world, with old deserts expanding and new deserts being formed. By official reports from Ministry of Science and Technology, another 2,500 sq km turns to desert each year. A task force says that desertification costs China about $2-3 billion annually, an estimated 110 million people suffer firsthand from the impacts of desertification. It is an issue that not only belongs to the natural disaster, but also would affect millions of people.
“Already a migration on the scale of the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930 is taking place in China. The only problem is that in China there is no California to escape to.” (Hays, 2008) Desertification in China is causing millions of rural Chinese to abandon unproductive land in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Provinces and to move to the east. A study by the Asian Development Bank found that about 4,000 villages are at risk of being swallowed up by drifting sand.
Analysis
Take a look at the reasons of how it happened. The major causes of land desertification in China are climate change and human economic activities.
Human activities are a direct cause of land desertification. Deforestation and desertification as well as dust storm are the words that always show up together. As the land in the northwest China is not good for crops cultivation, people there can only choose other ways to survive. As a result, the lands are easily to get overgrazed, overplanted, and over plowed. Once an area is degraded people move onto a new area and degrade that while the old area takes decades to recover or never does. These problems in turn are result of population pressures on marginal land. Rapid population increases have lead to over utilization of land resources. Northwest China has the land that lack of natural resources and environmental protection as well as scientific management. At the same time, some environmentalist chased back to Mao era, saying that one of the main culprits of the desertification was Mao's plan to raise grain in areas where grain didn't grow well, such as Inner Mongolia. This deprived the land of grass which prevented soil being blown away by the fierce winds that ravage this region.
As for the reason of climate change, scientists in Qinghai have recorded higher temperatures, lower rainfall and stronger winds since the 1950s. Persistent drought robs the soil of moisture and makes it easer for the soil to be picked up and carried away by wind. Sandstorms demonstrate the harmful and destructive impact of climate change. In May 1993 a sandstorm attacked over ten counties in four provinces including Xinjiang and Gansu. Soil loss due to wind erosion was ten to 15 cm, and sand loss, 20 to 150 cm for a total economic damage of 560 million RMB yuan.(Z&G,2004)
As aforementioned, 110 million people suffer firsthand from the impacts of desertification. Besides that, the sand from the distant Gobi desert even threatens Beijing, the capital city. According to Gluckman, dunes forming just 70 km from the capital may be drifting south at 20-25 km a year. And despite massive spending on land reclamation and replanting, China is falling behind.
Research I did
I believe that everyone who has done some research on desertification in China will realize it is quite a severe issue right now in China. However, Chinese media seems have no interest to cover that as a hot topic.
I chose Xinhua and CCTV as my news outlet for this research since they’re regarded as “elite media” in China and Xinhua is the Chinese official news website. And I got surprised by the research result. I first went to the Xinhua website; the layout on Xinhua is a little bit unique when compared to CNN or New York Times, because they don’t only divide their columns according to topics, moreover, they have different channels for different provinces. After I could find nothing about the desertification on the front page, I went to the channel “Qinghai” and “Gansu”, which are the 2 provinces that suffering most severe desertification. However, I could find nothing about his topic either. Then I used the key word “desertification” to search the news during the past 2 months. In fact there were only three pieces of news really talked about the desertification issue, and after I viewed these three pieces of news. I found out that they were actually about the same one, which is about a new forestry program is going to start in NingXia province and why it could be on the news is because it is the first program that China get sponsored by Germany. And also, it is the biggest international forestry aid projects so far.
How about CCTV? I used the same method, typed in the keywords and got a list of news. The real relevant news was one that dated back to March, 10th, talking about NPC (National People’s Congress) number tried to raise new policy for the desertification control and improvement.
Frankly speaking I was surprised by the researching result, for the whole media neglect on this issue. In fact it’s not difficult if you try to find information such as good examples of how China combating desertification. There are plenty of examples on the internet. However it is so hard to find the media coverage of what things are going on, in other words, we can only get the result rather than the progress. Under this circumstance, we’ll never know if certain program doesn’t work well. We can only get what media want to show us. That’s a passive way for obtaining information.
Since desertification news belongs to the environmental news, which usually doesn’t get much attention because people are in the entertainment news explosion and they tend to be less and less patient to such news, negative, far from where they live, not actually will influence their own lives. Those elements as we talked in the class. The second reason is that there always has even worse news such as earthquake in Yushu, or the good enough news like coming Shanghai Expo that distracts audiences’ attention. News like desertification in China has been and will be existed for the following years. It is a issue that takes time to deal with and get improved. One the one hand, it’s understandable that media have no interest to prefer reporting such news than covering more interesting ones. On the other hand, it is a severe issue that cannot be ignored. Audiences as we students cannot passively accept the news that media covered, for the reason that they’re usually “good results”, not the truth.
Environmental issues are always complicated, luckily, people now begin to realize them and try to fix them before the real disaster happens. I still hold the belief that human beings would live a better life if they maintain a good relationship with nature.
References:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7539e/w7539e03.htm
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/desertification/index.htm
Wenjuan, Z., & Jixi, G. (2004). Problems of Ecological Environment in Western China. Chinese Education & Society, 37(3), 15-20. Retrieved from ERIC database.
Knabe, F. (1999). Learning about Desertification. Green Teacher, (57), 12-14.
United Nations Environment Programme, N. (1987). Sands of Change: Why Land Becomes Desert and What Can Be Done about It. UNEP Environment Brief No. 2.
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