by Judith Bello
When I was growing up in the 1960s, science fiction was enormously popular. “Terraforming” was a key concept in stories about space travel, but rarely if ever related to our own Earth. Terraforming means changing the land, the atmosphere, and/or the flora and fauna to create an environment that can support life. Notably, in those days, “life” referred to human life in a world where alien life forms were not prioritized. Terraforming requires that you make changes to a complex system so as to create a self-sustaining ecosystem with the characteristics that you would like to see. For instance, terraforming Mars would entail warming the frozen surface and triggering some sort of growth cycle, beginning with plants to produce oxygen, and ultimately to create food for imported animals and the humans themselves.
In real life, terraforming requires a very sophisticated understanding of environmental elements and how they interact. Having a positive relationship with our own environment requires the same understanding of and respect for the integrity of environmental processes that would be necessary to adapt another land or another planet to our needs.
The science fiction plot of colonizing a new planet is often a metaphor for colonization on our own planet. While they might not use the techniques of terraforming in their home land, the colonizers would surely want to manage conquered lands to meet their convenience and tastes. This practice does not necessarily entail the deep understanding of natural processes that is required for successfully interacting with what appears to be a hostile or difficult environment in a new land or on a new planet.
Capitalist and Colonialist Visions of Terraforming
Capitalism and colonial expansion were so pervasive in Western culture that no one questioned the context of these stories. Terraforming was a tool for colonization, and colonization is what “civilized nations” do. There was no need to terraform your own planet or your own location because it had already produced your life. Even stories in which the earth’s environment had been destroyed had their characters looking to terraform a new planet instead of recovering their own.
The Israeli initiative to mold the land of the Palestinians to their vision is an attempt at terraforming with colonial intent. When the Israeli settlers arrived, the land was flourishing with olive and citrus groves. Modern technologies existed, but had not been applied to the extent of disrupting the environmental balance. The people there had an ancient culture with deep roots in the land. The new population, mostly from northern Europe, preferred their own agricultural products. They saw in the warm dry climate an opportunity for luxuries like year-round swimming pools and lush vegetation supported by irrigation.
Accustomed to the presence of large bodies of fresh water, they did not see the limitations of the fresh water supply or the value of the olive and citrus groves that had flourished in the region for millennia. They bled the underground aquifers that had sustained the native population dry, damaging the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River, ultimately creating a world that required the continuous acquisition of new water sources. For political reasons, they have uprooted the orchards that thrive in this environment and planted trees from their homelands over the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages.
Elon Musk, who owns several cutting-edge technology companies based in the United States, appears to espouse the original science fiction model of terraforming other planets. Every year, while public school budgets are being cut, the healthcare system is overloaded, and Social Security and the rest of the social safety net are threatened, he collects billions of dollars from the U.S. government to support his apparent dream of colonizing Mars.
Despite this, Musk is not actually investing in terraforming technologies. He has not even developed the technology to go to the moon, much less Mars. In a world where solar and wind power are suppressed to make way for gas and oil, where the possibility of using technology to mitigate global warming is dismissed by many political forces, Musk is powering his AI facilities with massive gas turbines that pollute local communities with toxic fumes. When actual terraforming—supporting the environment to enrich our lives—is left to oligarchs like Musk, it is relegated to the final phase of a fantastic dream.
Along Comes China, Terraforming for Life
By 1949, the Chinese revolution had ended thirty-five years of chaos and civil war in China, fifteen years of brutal Japanese colonization, and 200 years of British and American subjugation. The revolutionary government and five hundred million people found themselves hungry and tired and surrounded by a postwar wasteland. Members of the Communist Party of China rolled up their sleeves and went to work.
Fortunately, they didn’t begin with nothing. They had deficits in resources, education and scientific development, but their work was founded on 3,000 years of civilizational development. Remnants of ancient social structures and physical infrastructure already existed, from medical and educational systems, historical and philosophical works, and community solidarity to canals, irrigation ditches, and grain stores. These were the foundations that restoration could be built upon.
However, the arid land of western China was less inviting; in the modern era, it had become isolated from world trade routes by poverty and colonialism. The Silk Road had become a memory, buried in the dust and sand of the Taklamakan Desert. When the people’s government came to power, the dream of a new Silk Road came into focus, and the old Silk Road became a point of interest.
Fifty years ago, the government initiated the work of restraining the two great deserts: the Gobi in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, and the Taklamakan in Xinjiang. They began to build the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, or the “Great Green Wall,” tree by tree. The Great Green Wall was a people’s project. Thousands volunteered for the work of restoring the land. Peasants, farmers, and workers, both young and old, flooded the boundaries of the desert with pickaxes and shovels, planting seeds and seedlings… and they failed. Initially, they did not choose varieties of trees that would grow well in the dry conditions at the edge of the desert. The developed world laughed. But survival is a powerful incentive, and they persevered. After some experimentation, they found varieties more likely to succeed in these regions.
There were other problems, especially in sandy areas, where the ground was not stable enough for roots to take hold. This particular issue was eventually resolved by utilizing rice straw to make squares in which to plant. The rice straw held the soil in place creating a stable area for a plant to take root. Irrigation ditches and canals have been built to bring water to the surface from underground aquifers.
Trial and error, innovation, and technological and scientific advances eventually paid off. Little by little, the great sandy Taklamakan Desert was restrained. Along the road from Kashgar to Hotan, there are now bands of flourishing trees, rice straw checkerboards, and areas of scrub and brush growing along rickety fences. Highways cross the sandy wasteland and are not buried by the shifting dunes. The process has been expedited by water from the oasis where the ancient city of Hotan is once again a thriving center of agriculture and trade. While it is still a work in progress, the desert is no longer expanding.
Xinjiang Close Up
I visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China in early September of 2025 with a small delegation of six people including our guide. We spent nearly ten days in the region, first a couple of days in Ürümqi, then a couple of days in Kashgar, and finally a few days in Hotan. There is a great deal of security everywhere in Xinjiang due to issues with the Turkistan Islamic Party, a violent far-right relative of ISIS and Al Qaeda. The areas I visited, however, were quiet, friendly working class neighborhoods for the most part.
The XUAR lies north of Tibet in the shadow of the Kunlun mountains—not the highest in China, but a place of mythical significance, that feeds the oasis at Hotan as well as groundwater reservoirs under the desert. Peaches originally come from this region, where they were once deemed the food of the gods. To the north, high mountains bring glacial waters into the region beyond the desert. My delegation had a stopover in Altay, a stunningly beautiful city in the mountains in the far north, on our way back to Shanghai. This apparently desolate region is endowed with great wealth.
Ürümqi is a bustling hub of industry in the region. A woman who worked at my hotel led me through a gated residential area on the way to find a bank one day. There were gates both for people and cars at each end of a long block, lined with shops on the street level with apartments above them. The gates were manned by security guards who appeared to be local. On one side of the street the sidewalk gate was open, but on the other it was closed. The guard would lift a barrier to allow cars through one at a time. The area was bustling with shoppers; fruits and vegetables and even live chickens in cages were set out on the sidewalk to draw their attention. We also visited an oil company conference and a wonderful cultural museum.
Kashgar is an old Uyghur city near the western border of China, not far, in fact, from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Currently Kashgar has been restored as a tourist center, with a level of hustle and bustle I found a little disquieting. As we walked through the narrow cobbled streets of the “Old City,” we saw a group of women dancing down the street followed by men and women riding horses and camels. The old architecture was interesting, but the people don’t live in the Old City any more, preferring the nearby high-rises on quiet streets behind the tourist area.
From Kashgar we took the train to Hotan, a city on the southern Silk Road, or the “Old Tea Horse Road” in Chinese. The train was an old-fashioned sleeper with private cabins with bunks in some cars and open dormitories in others. We rode in a private cabin during the day and the scenery was stunning. The patches of sandy desert were broken by farmland bounded by mature trees with irrigation canals and ditches in all the green areas. In some areas desert sands were covered with a patchwork of rice straw squares, and in others young trees or shrubs clung to mesh and picket fences. Stands of mature trees came and went in the background as we traveled.
Hotan, which rests on a substantial oasis, has been continuously inhabited for at least three thousand years. When we arrived by train, there was a large statue of NeZha, a defiant young “Demon Orb” recently popularized in Chinese media, standing by the door. The city has a modern look, with cultural remnants of ancient times embedded here and there. In a thriving night market, inside a long building, there were a few traditional gift shops but mostly specialty foods like ostrich eggs, sheep testicles, snails and turtles and all kinds of oddities. The main bazaar was a huge open air market selling local crafts, foods and more.
Also in Hotan, we walked to a huge public square with a central statue of a Uyghur official greeting Chairman Mao when they first integrated the region into the People’s Republic of China. At dusk, the trees surrounding the square were illuminated with festive lights and tinsel, balloons drifted in the air, and the statue in the center of the square was lit up. Several groups of people gathered in different areas of the square with boom boxes and danced to their music. In one group there were dozens of people, with more gathering as time passed, doing an aerobic dance to techno music. In other groups, couples were dancing traditional Uyghur dances, ballroom dancing, and more. A basketball game was going on one side. Everywhere we went, we were invited to join the fun.
Aquaculture and Prosperity
Today, with 1.4 billion mouths to feed, the Chinese government has continued to experiment and innovate. They found that the desert and the glacial waters coming from the towering mountain ranges surrounding Xinjiang provided a fertile environment for growing fish. Salmon thrived in the fresh mountain streams. Desert lakes and water tanks filled from the underlying aquifer could be seeded with fish and shellfish from far-away lakes and oceans, and with a little technology, their progeny would thrive.
Aquaculture is a growing resource and business opportunity in China’s great deserts, making high-quality protein and delicious fresh seafood available to once impoverished populations, and supporting a high-end export business as well. I visited a fish farm outside of Hotan and had a brief conversation with their communications worker, a very pleasant young man who provided tea and fruit during our conversation, which took place in a quietly affluent corporate office.
I was aware that the aquaculture business around Hotan was not fully developed and expected to meet with a local farmer with a couple of water tanks, but this was a large corporate undertaking initiated in late 2023 and already operational with fifty-six tanks amounting to 2,240 square meters of fresh water and another seventy-two temporary tanks for imports. The tanks are moderated by a complex technological system. Hotan is a great location for this type of aquaculture, since it is situated on a freshwater oasis with the water table only ten meters below the ground, so there is no risk of undermining local water resources.
This aquaculture corporation specializes in large fish like bass, blackfish and silver cod, suitable for sale to restaurants. So far, they only have permission to sell locally, but they expect to be exporting very soon. Meanwhile, they use their temporary tanks to house king crab and fancy shellfish imported from other parts of China to boost interest locally. The enterprise is a private company with two large investors from Beijing, and also some government investment. Most of the local employees are Uyghurs, who are a minority in China but make up most of the population in Hotan. These jobs provide them with opportunities to integrate with the more developed business culture and scientific development in the east. Overall, the business is a win for the local community, bringing jobs and prosperity as well as a source of quality nutrition, and is a model for more fish farms in similar contexts. On the day I visited, the company was expecting to entertain a delegation of investors from Tibet who are interested in developing a similar startup there.
The Great Green Wall and desert aquaculture are two ways in which China is terraforming the desert to enhance the well-being of local populations and increase the long-term balance of natural resources. It is a model for other regions where vast areas of desertification have made life difficult for humans and other living beings. Natural processes can be augmented to bring about prosperity and a greener and healthier Earth, and China is leading the way.
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Judith Bello is the editor of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) blog, End the Wars at Home and Abroad, as well as several other blogs including the West Asia Sovereignty Support Movement. She is a consultant in web publishing, and hosts numerous websites. Judith was design editor for the book Sanctions – A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy.