Shi Guangyin: one life, one job — turning desert into farmland

Dingbian county, Shaanxi, on the southern edge of the Mu Us Desert.

When Shi Guangyin was eight, a black wind came over the dunes and picked him up. It carried him and a boy from the village dozens of kilometers out into the sand. Three days later his family found him far away, still minding the sheep. The other boy never came back.

He says the hatred of sand started that day.

The hatred turned into forty years of stubborn work. In 1984, when the state began encouraging individuals to contract desert land, Shi made a decision his whole family argued against. He resigned as head of the township farm and contracted three thousand mu of barren sand on behalf of his village. He was the first person in the country to do it. People laughed at him. "Can you eat sand?" He moved his family out to the edge of the dunes and put his promise in writing: "If I cannot hold this sand, I give up this land."

Langwosha, Wolf's Den Sand, was the first real battle. Several thousand mu of bare dune. When the wind got up it tore the new seedlings out by the roots and carried them away. The first year, fewer than one in ten lived. The second year he changed methods and lost again. The third year he went back to the crudest approach there is: first stake straw into checkerboards to pin the surface, then plant trees, shrubs and grass together, and push forward one meter at a time. That autumn, the trees held.

Standing in a Langwosha that had turned green, a man who never shed a tear in front of wind and sand cried like a child.

In the decades after, he kept moving into the heart of the desert with the villagers behind him. He set up a sand-control company and organized households that had worked alone into contiguous blocks. Where saline and alkaline ground refused to grow anything, he brought water in to leach the salt and improved the soil. Once the sand was stable he planted crops between the shelterbelts and raised cattle and sheep in them, so that the people doing the planting could earn from it. "If planting trees earns a family nothing," he said, "this work will not last."

Over more than forty years, a quarter of a million mu of waste and alkali flat turned green. In the Mu Us, his belts of trees joined with the belts planted by thousands of other people until the desert was pushed to the edge of retreat. The Mu Us became the first desert in the world on the verge of disappearing.

The price was real. In 2008 his son Shi Zhanjun was driving a load of saplings when the truck crashed, and he could not be saved. A father buried his son. For days Shi Guangyin could not put a sentence together. When the funeral was over the family told him to rest. He kept his head down and said one thing: "The trees are still waiting in the sand." Then he went back into the forest.

Some people did not understand it and said he had been hard on his son. Only the sand-control people understood. Those trees had been planted by two generations together.

"While there is life, the sand work does not stop." He said it for half his life, and then he spent the other half making it true.

In 2021, on the hundredth anniversary of the Party, Shi Guangyin was awarded the July 1 Medal. When he walked up to receive it, this farmer out of the dunes was neatly dressed and his hands were rough as old bark. A reporter asked what he had been after all these years, and he answered without dressing it up. "My name is Shi Guangyin. In my life I have done one thing — sand control. If this desert does not become farmland, I will not close my eyes."

In Dingbian now, caragana flowers in the sand and poplars stand in rows, and crops are grown all the way out to where the wind used to be at its worst. The children here do not know what a black wind looked like. The dust storms in their textbooks are their grandfathers' memory.

Turning that memory into a page in a textbook — that is the love Shi Guangyin's generation left to the world.