\u201cOnly people who are extremely resilient can do this kind of work,\u201d Zhao said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery spring, we face strong winds and frequent sandstorms. Sometimes we have to live deep in the desert, with no electricity or water. We have to truck water in ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many workers left after a short time, but Zhao stayed. He later brought his parents to join him and began recruiting labourers from his hometown, as well as from Yunnan and Sichuan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe locals wouldn\u2019t do it as they make a living from herding, so I saw an opportunity and brought over more than a dozen people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Zhao is now a contractor bidding on shelterbelt projects. At peak periods, he supervises teams of up to 1,000 workers, with daily wages ranging from about US$30 to US$60 depending on output.<\/p>\n
He also documents his work on the popular Chinese short-video sharing platform Douyin, where encouragement from viewers has helped sustain his motivation.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlanting trees is a self-healing process. You plant something and watch it grow \u2026 In recent years, that kind of (desert) weather has almost disappeared. The environment is clearly improving,\u201d Zhao pointed out.<\/p>\n
SCIENCE BEHIND SURVIVAL<\/p>\n
In the early years of the Shelterbelt programme, large-scale planting was carried out rapidly, but survival rates were low. In some areas, only 30 per cent of saplings survived the harsh and arid conditions.<\/p>\n
Scientific research proved critical to improving outcomes.<\/p>\n
Wang Haibing, an assistant professor at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, said early failures highlighted the destructive impact of wind erosion.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter spring plowing, when the crops have grown to this height, if a sandstorm hits \u2013 just a single one \u2013 at least a third of the farmland will have its seedlings completely destroyed, beaten into mud and sand,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOnly people who are extremely resilient can do this kind of work,\u201d Zhao said. \u201cEvery spring, we face…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[891,5147,1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-419038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-china","tag-ecology","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}