The Chinese way to protect the environment

Can you believe this:
"Living in the mountains brought many difficulties to the villagers such as education, transportation, water supply, medical care and even marriage," said an official surnamed Zhao of the town of Zhenluoying in Pinggu district [in Beijing Municipality]. The Chinese official adds that the relocation will bring much convenience to their life and some job opportunities and it will also be good for mountain forestry.
It is difficult to understand how emptying the mountains of its traditional inhabitants will help 'mountain forestry'.
The same theory has been applied in Tibet where the chang-thang, traditionally the habitat of the Tibetan nomads has been emptied of its nomads to ...'preserve' the environment.
Last year a report of Xinhua News Agency affirmed that: "China has settled nearly 50,000 Tibetan nomads into sedentary communities in a drive to protect the remote alpine region's fragile ecology from their herds". The report continued: "49,631 people from nomadic families were settled over the past four years…[after being] relocated from a rugged region on the Tibetan plateau that is home to the headwaters of three of Asia's major rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong."
Unbelievable! 
If the Chinese leaders are serious, they should do an operation à la Pol Pot and remove the inhabitants of the big cities like Beijing which are polluting much more than the nomads or the mountain folks. Such a non-sense!


Villagers told to descend
Global Times
April 28 2010
By Li Yanhui
Thousands of villagers in the city's mountainous areas must leave home in October to live down in the valleys.
Started in 2005, the mountainous villager relocation project has already moved 50,000 villagers, meaning 221 villages have disappeared off the map of the city, according to the Beijing Daily.
About 80 families of Zhangjiatai in Pinggu district are preparing to move to their new village at the foot of the mountain.
Some 6,000 other mountain villagers around Beijing will also be moved before No-vember to new homes.
"Living in the mountains brought many difficulties to the villagers such as educa-tion, transportation, water supply, medical care and even marriage," said an official surnamed Zhao of the town of Zhenluoying in Pinggu district.
"The relocation will bring much convenience to their life and some job opportunities."
Relocation will also be good for mountain forestry, she said.
The government has invested more than 1.2 billion yuan ($175.78 million) in new homes and infrastructure, according to the Beijing Daily.
Government previously had to invest large sums each year repairing roads and maintaining water and power supplies to these remote villages.
"Relocating a village can save more than 1.3 million yuan ($190,429) investment in infrastructure," an official at the Beijing Municipal Commission of Rural Affairs told the Beijing Daily.
An investigation carried out for the mountainous villager relocation project concluded that the 68,000 farmers living in mountainous areas faced daily living difficulties and threats from natural disasters such as rivers bursting their banks.
Some Liulitai villagers involved in the pilot project had doubts about the idea, as they had to invest about 200,000 yuan ($29,296.73) in a new home, said resident Liu Hai.
"I now have to walk about four kilometers to the farmland to take care of the fruit trees on the mountain," he said.
The move proved a success, he said, when families found they were able to repay their debt within two or three years by supplying accommodation to travelers.
The relocation project has also made 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of farmland available for planting trees, according to the Beijing Daily.