ABSTRACT
China has experienced a great deal of change in its land use during the past 50 years. Land reclamation in this period has been one of the important and direct factors influencing land-use changes and leading to many impacts on the environment in China. Land reclamation has mainly been effected in marginal or environmentally fragile areas due to their relatively large land reserves. In those areas it played an important role in maintaining the balance of arable land but concomitantly caused serious environmental problems, especially in the form of soil erosion, rapid expansion of desertification, loss of soil nutrients, and so forth. Because of the increasingly serious environmental problems caused by reclamation, as well as popularization of the concept of sustainable development, and improvement of socio-economic-political management levels, central and local governments of China awakened to the dangers caused by large-scale reclamation, particularly in remote and fragile areas, and made some institutional and policy changes in this regard. Hopefully those changes will perfect reclamation practices in future. Governmental management and control of reclamation will become stricter and most reclamation activities will be replaced by rehabilitation or other environmentally sound activities. In 1994, the government declared that sustainable development should be the basic state development strategy and agricultural growth by reclamation
henceforth regarded as neither environmentally nor economically sound. Land reclamation would be slowed down and land reclamation activities in remote and fragile areas gradually replaced by land improvement practices such as returning arable land on the slopes to forest or grassland.
