According to CCTV, the investigation team of the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the State Forestry and Grassland Bureau of mainland China announced on March 19 the investigation of the problems related to the destruction of protective forests in Yangguan Forestry, which appeared in the southwest area of Yangguan Forestry.
The report pointed out that the Yangguan forestry field has irregularly approved the occupation of protective forests to build vineyards, date gardens, etc., irregularly occupied forest land to build engineering facilities, as well as indiscriminate felling phenomenon. Some trees were severely damaged by lack of water and the number of tree forests was reduced, resulting in weakening of the wind protection function of the protective forests. Other problems include the illegal misappropriation of national forest ecological benefit compensation funds, as well as the illegal approval of forest land contracted to enterprises.
The briefing also said that Gansu Province has also set up a rectification and reform steering group, which has initiated rectification work on the specific problems verified, and launched investigations into possible dereliction of duty.
The official media claimed that western China’s fragile ecological environment is also the hardest hit by ecological damage, with Wang Sanyun, former secretary of the CPC Gansu Provincial Committee, and Zhao Zhengyong, former secretary of the CPC Shaanxi Provincial Committee, having fallen in the Qilian Mountains and Qinling environmental issues.
On March 15, Beijing and several northern cities issued yellow warnings for sandstorms, with the entire city shrouded in yellow sand and visibility less than 1,000 meters in most areas, and people said they could not see the buildings across the street. Beijing Ecological Environment Monitoring Center informed that as of 9:00 a.m. on the 15th, the PM10 concentration of suspended particulates in the center of Beijing and six suburban areas was approaching 10,000 micrograms per cubic meter, and the air quality had reached heavy pollution. Jilin, Henan, Shandong and other places are also in the impact area. This is the most severe dust and sandstorm in nearly a decade since the Chinese Communist Party authorities took measures to prevent wind and fix sand, reaching the level of a strong sandstorm. The last severe sandstorm dates back to 2015.
Beijing’s dust storms have quickly become a hot topic of discussion on the Internet in mainland China for days. On mainland China’s social networking site Weibo, “Beijing sand and dust” has been read by 350 million people. Netizens have been laughing at themselves, saying, “With this weather in Beijing, it’s hard not to ride a camel” and “Beijing is being scraped back into the yellowing paintings of the Northern Song Dynasty by the sand and dust.” “Beijing becomes the Northern Song Dynasty”.
However, the outside world noticed that on the day the sandstorm hit Beijing, the People’s Daily, the official media of the Communist Party of China, launched a special report titled “Yellow Sand is Retreating, Green Trees are Becoming Shade” on sand prevention and sand control and promoting ecological restoration. The report claimed that during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, Inner Mongolia’s desertification and sandy land area continued to decrease and the desert expansion problem was curbed.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian earlier shrugged off criticism that the sandstorm hit South Korea from mainland China at a press conference, saying, “This sandstorm originated outside mainland China, and mainland China is only a way station.”
The official quickly threw out the “Dunhuang deforestation case” report in Gansu to hold the local authorities accountable, which is a way to dump the pot and find a scapegoat for the problem, which is from below and outside. This is the usual behavior of the central authorities of the Chinese Communist Party, but in the end the party is still great, glorious and correct.
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