A Lake for All and All for a Lake

The combination of beautiful scenery and wonderful stories can always blend well together. The beauty of Fuxian Lake brings a cry of joy to the lips of everyone who sees it, but few of them know the story behind it. Yunnan Gateway which is run by Yunnan Daily Press Group invited the Hainan International Media Center to Fuxian Lake to help tell the story of the local residents who guard the lake’s clear waters.

Fuxian Lake is located in Chengjiang County,Yunnan Province. Among all the freshwater lakes at this latitude, it is the only one in the world which has maintained Class I water quality. With an average water depth of 95.2 meters, the lake contains twenty billion cubic meters of water.

This lake alone accounts for 9.16% of all the water of all the freshwater lakes in all of China. Protecting Fuxian Lake is equivalent to protecting 15.8 tons of high-quality freshwater resources for every person in the country. It is sometimes said that Fuxian Lake is not only the “eyes of Yuxi”, and the “representative of Yunnan”, but that it is also the “wealth of China”.

Once upon a time not that long ago, non-point source pollution caused by the daily lives of residents near Fuxian Lake was the biggest threat to this plateau lake’s ecological environment. Although it was hard for residents to leave their homes, the immediate protection of the lake was sufficiently important that the choice was made!

Facing a severe situation, the Yuxi Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government made the decision to relocate more than 30,000 residents away from the newly designated lakeside ecological protection zone.

One can imagine how difficult it must have been for ordinary people to move away from the place where they, their parents, and their parents’ parents had lived since time immemorial. During the process of ecological resettlement, the government of Chengjiang County paid an exceptional amount of attention to the people being moved in order to guarantee that they would not suffer any ill effects from their resettlement.

Those people who chose to move to the city were compensated with 120% the amount of land area which they had owned lakeside as well as being given 10 square meters of commercial property per person. After the construction of their new urban residential area was completed, they would be able—through collective lease operations—to jointly generate benefits and dividends.

For the ecological protection of Fuxian Lake, one of the most important tasks was to reduce agricultural non point-source pollution. Nearly 4,000 hectares of land in the Fuxian watershed which had previously been used year-round to plant vegetables was first allowed to lie fallow and then specifically planted with characteristic local agricultural products such as blueberries, lotus roots, and rice.

From this change in crops, the farmers who work on this land are now able to get about CNY 60,000 per hectare in income. In order to promote gainful employment of the relocated people, Chengjiang County created and developed multiple rounds of free vocational skills training courses.

A good ecological environment is its own kind of wealth. As of now, the lotus ponds and wetlands along Fuxian Lake have become one of the region's new scenic attractions with several pastoral garden projects welcoming tourists from all over the world.

By protecting the clear blue waters of Fuxian Lake, Chengjiang is realizing ecological dividends as well as financial ones. Protecting the ecological environmental and development projects designed to protect the environment lead to results which greatly benefit the masses.

Realizing that green hills and blue water are worth more than piles of silver and gold, and having tasted the sweet benefits of protecting the land, the people realized the organic unity of ecological beauty and economic prosperity, and they began to take more conscious effort to protect the environment.

By Chu Mengqi and Marian Rosenberg (Hainan International Media Center)