Children scramble up a hill in bare feet, leaving their village behind and kicking up dust clouds. Licking cracked lips, they squint at the only ocean they have ever known -- the undulating sand creeping silently toward their doors.
It would be nice to pretend there was lush vegetation here once, but there hasn't been any in human memory. Han'eriq Towenhan'eriq is part of the parched expanse that is Xinjiang in China's far northwest. And lately, the desert has been making its move.
""We're used to this. It's just part of us, said Memetiming Weili, one of several laborers in the tiny community. "But the sand just keeps on coming."
For hundreds of wood-and-earthen villages across Xinjiang, connected by gargantuan valleys where mountains of sand loom 30m high, the story is the same: The desert is spreading, and the government is waging an increasingly vigorous fight to halt it.
Sand and the winds that spread it have hurt harvests, sickened farmers, endangered airplanes and undermined efforts to electrify rural areas by knocking down power lines. Now China, which has a history of huge public works projects, from the ancient Great Wall to the modern Three Gorges Dam, is trying to control the desert itself.
Six months ago the government launched its latest nationwide campaign to combat desertification, enlisting 10,000 scholars, experts and engineers in an 18-month effort to reduce sand problems in 851 dust-bowl counties, most of them in the west.
It's a battle against a foe that has history on its side.
"The tragedy of deserts devouring cities has been repeated time and again along the Silk Road," the People's Daily said in December.
Each spring, sand storms fed by the deserts of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang blow through Chinese regions deforested during the past century and roll southeast toward Beijing and the eastern seaboard, covering entire towns with a sickly yellow haze. The fine dust blows out across the Pacific, clouding skies in several East Asian nations and occasionally drifting as far as Arizona.
Urban northerners call them shachenbao or dust-cloud tempests, and face them with masks and scarves. When SARS hit Beijing last year, many people already had face shields ready from their battles with airborne sand.
But what is seasonal in the northeast is a way of life for the northwest, where angry thickets of dust, like the Tasmanian Devil in old cartoons, whirl across the landscape.
"You think Beijing sandstorms are bad?" says Li Bujun of the Xinjiang Desert Section at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "If you go out in a dust storm in Beijing, at least you can still drive. Here, you can't even open your eyes."
China's deserts grew by 50,000km2 from 1994 to 1999. In Xinjiang alone, the slow-moving sand encroaches on 400km2 a year, swallowing fields, roads and entire villages.
Years of unrestrained tree-cutting made things worse.
Since 2000, the government has planted 1.4 million hectares of trees across Xinjiang, many of them the white poplars considered the best sand breaks. "Ten years of planting trees, a century of forests blooming," one sign proclaims.
Liu Zhijun, who has fought China's sands for four decades, lives in a bungalow on the front line. He tends an oasis of rich greens and deep yellows abutting the Tazhong Oil Station in the Taklamakan Desert's remote reaches, testing sand-break plants, fences and anti-sand netting.
Nestled in the dunes, his various grasses -- prototypes for a sand-restraining "green belt" -- struggle to survive. He has tried 150 species, from sand-date trees to red willows to bushes; 100 have survived the punishment and are being planted along highways.
His research is funded by the government, which has chipped in 100 million yuan (US$12.1 million), and Petrochina, the state oil company, which has contributed 120 million yuan and expects its oilfields to be protected by any progress made.
More than 280km away lie the communities of wind-swept Qira County, where local lore says the evaporation rate is higher than the rainfall. Its people tout their success story -- more land reclaimed for growing cotton and hundreds of new homes built as the sand line has been forced back to pre-1980s locations.
When the county began sand-control efforts in 1982, 38 villages had been covered by sand and were uninhabitable. Dozens of families were packing up and retreating from the sand line each year.
But two decades of efforts -- including rerouting a local river, erecting a grass belt and planting a forest -- took back 10,000 hectares. Now, says sand-control expert Zhang Henian, "We need to make the reclaimed land productive."
Half of Qira County remains covered by sand dunes. And all around Xinjiang, the task remains equally daunting.
As it tries to apply modern solutions to the most ancient of environmental threats, China's fight rages in places like Han'eriq Towenhan'eriq, where sand is pushing into the village and edging toward the moist rice paddies at its far edge.
Villagers want to hope. But lifetimes coated in sand can make people wonder if there is anything else beyond the dunes.
"We can make small differences," said Liu, the sand expert, dust blowing against his weather-beaten face. "But you can't make the whole desert green."
On the Net:
China Desertification Information Network: www.din.net.cn
China National Desertification Monitoring Center: www.din.net.cn/jczx/tjc.html
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