This Day, That Year: March 12

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

March 12, 1980 marked the country's first National Tree Planting Day to raise public awareness of environmental protection.

At that time, drought and excessive lumbering with little awareness of conservation had diminished water resources and caused soil erosion as well as desertification.

In 1981, the central government launched a national voluntary tree-planting campaign. Every Chinese citizen older than 11 had a duty, the campaign stressed, to plant three to five trees each year.

Over the past four decades, people from all walks of life have participated in tree planting, as seen in the item on March 13, 1989, in China Daily.

Millions of citizens volunteered to play their part in making the country greener.

As of 2017, more than 200 million trees had been planted in Beijing's tree-planting campaigns.

The area of artificial forests across China exceeds 69.3 million hectares, the most in the world, following more than six decades of afforestation work, according to the statistics from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. The total forest area has grown to 208 million hectares from 82 million hectares in the early 1950s, covering nearly 22 percent of the land area, compared with just 8.6 percent six decades ago.

Thanks to the efforts, China has effectively contained desertification, with deserts shrinking continuously over the past decade.

The country aims to increase its forest coverage ratio to 23 percent by 2020 and up to at least 26 percent by 2035.