On an August day last year, Xi Jinping visited Saihanba National Forest Park to inspect the trees and flowers.
Spanning nearly 200,000 acres northwest of Beijing, the old imperial hunting ground turned to desert in the 19th century amidst deforestation and overuse. With no trees left to catch the wind, violent sandstorms rolled in from Inner Mongolia, filling Beijing’s air with choking sediment. But in 1962, Chinese authorities began a multi-decade project to restore the region into a “Great Green Wall” defending the capital.
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It worked. Today, Saihanba is the world’s largest planted forest. During his visit, Xi praised the Communist Party’s four decades of “struggle,” which he said had transformed a wasteland where “yellow sand covered up the sky” into “a source of rivers, a homeland of clouds, a world of flowers, a sea of forests and a paradise for birds.” Saihanba, Xi said a
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