First time i hear of this great news and happy for once to hear a little bit about propaganda that is not from USA and pro environment.

Now : Tiananmen Square massacre has been an atrocious tragedy and China's help in ruSSia invasion of Ukraine is horrible.

My viewpoint: turning it into a carbon sink is likely true. A desert is near carbon neutral in its natural state anyway. Not much grows and not much decomposes. Adding even a bit of vegetation turns it into a carbon sink, but the number next to the minus sign will be very small, considering the total area.

Takla Makan is big (for those acquainted with Europe, about the size of Germany). Planting great numbers of bushes, shrubs and trees along the edges and the river beds will contain its shifting and spare settlements on the edges from the nuisance, but the desert remains a desert.

There is no need to confirm, they've published more than a bit about it. China has been working on containing the desert since 1978. A road was built across the desert more recently, in 1995, and a railway around it. They intend to drill a 11 km research hole to study the local region of the Earth's crust. They intend to produce solar power.

Locals... well, this is Xinjiang. Locals mostly aren't Han (ethnically Chinese) but various Turkic peoples, including the seriously repressed Uyghurs. They would probably fear a mass of Han Chinese moving in more than a mass of sand, but they are most likely OK with the trees, because sand pesters them just as badly. So far, it looks like not much is happening in that part of Xinjiang, because there is not much to build an economy on. Solar power is nice, but if sand buries it, it's not so great. Currently, if you build a solar power plant to a random place in Takla Makan, there is a considerably above-zero chance of the desert burying it. Fencing it with lots of trees (irrigation needed) will allow a project to perhaps operate long enough.

Am on mobile rn and can’t easily search myself but such a large endeavour could be visible from google maps maybe? Even between 2 snapshots ?

And while they're at it, make sure that the people who completed such a feat were adequately paid for their time and given the rights and good working conditions.

What?... it was indentured minorities? Ah yeah, I figured.

Probably fertilized the soil with the blood of the Uyghurs they've got in concentration camps.

The other side of this is that they’ve been doing this since the late 70s and have a wealth of information about what works and what doesn’t work.

Something like a quarter of China is desert, so they have vested interest in actually making this work.

I agree you get a lot of propo, but what do you think the point of that is here?

While I hear ya, it seems to be a proper article from a proper outlet written by someone reputable, albeit based on a study by a bunch of chinese researchers- not that there is anything inherently suspicious about that.

I also got the "feel-good China slop" reaction at first but I don't know, seems legit.

They’re stories that are generally on the same topic, their focuses are different.

Also, thought you seemed familiar. Last time I commented was in response to basically the same stuff.

My understanding is that the Gobi Desert has historically been expanding due to desertification of the surrounding grasslands, and the project to plant trees in this area was to halt or reverse this process. In other words, the ecological destruction was already occurring.

But double check me.