In the Kubuqi Desert, about 800 kilometers west of Beijing, 60-year-old sand-control worker Yin Yuzhen now works from dawn to noon each day tending trees and replacing the straw grids she began planting decades ago, AP reported Monday from a government-organized media tour [1]. Half a century of that labor -- forearm-length sticks pushed into shifting sand, row crossing row into a lattice -- is the iconic image of the campaign China calls the Three-North Protective Forest Program, or the Green Great Wall, launched in 1978 [1].

The numbers are real. Desertified land in northern China peaked in 2000 and has shrunk by more than 1,000 square kilometers a year since, according to state media data [1]. Zhu Jiaojun, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Applied Ecology, told AP his team's monitoring shows overall desertified land down roughly 10 percent since 2000, with severely degraded land off by more than 40 percent; program forests now cover a cumulative 500,000 square kilometers [1].

The checkerboards do not hold on their own. AP notes the technique stabilizes dunes only with water piped through an irrigation system, and Yin's daily rounds exist because plants die when set too shallow and grids wear out [1]. Zhu estimated more than 300 million rural laborers have worked the program, mostly paid part-time. "The achievement," he said, "is due to people's hard work and a bit of luck with climate" [1].

State imagery sells a finished victory; online skeptics dismiss every planted grid as propaganda. AP's field report lands between them: measurable gains that depend on irrigation, constant maintenance, and, in the scientists' own words, decades more work [1].

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago