What is the conservation situation in China?
For thousands of years up to the present, China has relied heavily on wood for construction and fuel. Deforestation has created many desert areas in north and northwest China. The Da-Qing-Shan (Big Green Mountain) outside of Hohhot (Nei Mongol or Inner Mongolia) is a desert with dust-filled air and soil erosion cracks of more than 10 meters wide. It was a thick forest during the “Warlord Period” only 70 years ago. The expansion of the desert and the shrinking of the prairie grassland of northeastern provinces and Nei Mongol occurred during the 1970s when the government decided to convert the grassland into crop fields. Rampant deforestation continues. In the course of the compilation of Florae Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae, the Chinese language flora of China, taxonomists found that about 10 percent (approximately 3,000 species) of the total Chinese species they dealt with are threatened or endangered. It is likely that some of them have already become extinct, or are very rare and in
