Forest clearing to create more farmland has destroyed the precarious balance of a fragile ecosystem.
In the 1950s, the government built the Hongyashan reservoir on the Shiyang River and in the three decades that followed, residents dug more than 10,000 wells. The positive economic impact was immediate: Minqin County became the top producer of wheat and [...]

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Winning and then staging what are sure to be spectacular and successful games will help justify the party’s continued rigid authority, and let it bask in most Chinese people’s excitement to be hosts.
But the games will also be seen as one of history’s most expensive, and well-orchestrated, coming-out parties.
After three decades of breakneck economic growth, [...]

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Like Su, China is already trying to look ahead after the magnitude-7.9 earthquake. Reconstruction has started, even as the communist government attempts to feed and shelter about 5 million people left homeless by the massive disaster.
Shopkeepers who lost years of investment are plotting how to get their businesses running again. The government’s open response may [...]

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It has been three decades since China’s one-child policy was introduced as a temporary measure to slow the country’s population growth. But there’s rising opposition to the policy amid criticism that it’s creating another demographic crisis.
The trends are exemplified in the city of Shanghai, which has the lowest birth rate and the highest proportion [...]

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For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand [...]

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