After a hard morning planting fresh shoots in the dunes on the edge of the Gobi Desert, 78-year-old farmer Wang Tianchang retrieves a three-stringed lute from his shed, sits down beneath the fiery midday sun, and starts to play.
"If you want to fight the desert, there's no need to be afraid," sings Wang, a veteran of China's decades-long state campaign to "open up the wilderness", as he strums the instrument, known as the sanxian.
Their painstaking work to rehabilitate marginal land has been promoted as an inspiration for the rest of the country, and they are the subject of government propaganda posters celebrating their role in holding back the sand. The flowering bush known as the sweetvetch has an 80% success rate even in harsh desert conditions and has become a key part of efforts to "hold down the sand", a term used locally for planting bushes and grasses in even squares across the desert slopes to stop sand drifting into nearby farmland.
Trees have become a major part of the local economy. Hongshui is dominated by a large state-owned commercial forest estate called Toudunying. "They have been living in similar conditions for generations," said Ma Lichao, China country director for the Forest Stewardship Council, a non-profit organisation promoting sustainable forest management. "But it is very important to say that climate change is something very new."China plans to increase total forest coverage from 23% last year to 24.1% by 2025, but the constant expansion has masked many underlying problems.
One such state-backed forest farm designed to repair the region's overworked ecosystem is the 4,200-acre Yangguan project, on the outskirts of the city of Dunhuang, which has proven controversial. There are signs that China has learned from past mistakes, when trees were planted - often by scattering seeds from military aircraft - with no consideration for existing ecosystems or weather conditions, meaning many failed to take root.
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