ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the dominant land-use strategies that have been adopted in China's northern regions since the inception of the PRC in 1949. These strategies have had to meet a trifold challenge: to deal with a semi- to hyper-arid climate with limited surface-water availability, a pressing demand for agricultural surpluses to foster rapid industrialisation and the urgency to cope with the increasing deterioration of the country's dryland ecosystems. The chapter describes the interdependence between conflicting land-use strategies and competing perceptions of land degradation in the sanbei regions, emphasising that land degradation as well as its countermeasures should be understood as an aggregate result of socio-environmental processes varying over space and time. The chapter traces the dynamic interplay between the natural environment, land-use practices, soil, water and forest resources management and environmental change from the 1950s to the present.
