This fact denotes that the country has more than 100 million hectares of non-forest lands, which will allow potential development of forestation projects. The accumulated standing forest per hectare in China is 90 cubic meters, while the world average is 110 cubic meters and that in Switzerland is 234, which is the greatest in the world. The growth increments of lumber per hectare in China are 2.4 cubic meters, whereas that in the "forestry-developed" countries amounts to 3 cubic meters or more.
Since 1949, China has established forestry organizations on every administrative level from central to local, and implemented a series of policies, measures, laws and regulations to broadly promote afforestation which have achieved success to some extent. In the distant part, the country's the large land area was covered by many forests, which have been remorselessly destroyed by natural and man-made disasters over thousands of years. In the early 1950s, the forest area occupied only 8.6% of the country. From 1949 to today, coastal regions including Guangdong, Fujiang, and Zhejiang have created coastal protection forests, and provinces in the southern part of the Yangtze have timber and economic forests mainly consisting of cedars. Farmland-protection forests have been created in farmlands in the northern areas and the Yangtze midstream areas. Airplanes did seeding for creation of forests in mountainous areas of extensive breadth and small populations, where transport is not sufficiently available. In 1978, the Chinese Government began creating protective forests in the "Three Northern Districts" consisting of the Northeast, North, and West districts, and this afforestation project has been on the largest scale to date. With all these efforts, the proportion of China's forest area achieved 13.92%, with an artificially planted forest area of 33.31 million hectare, which is about a quarter of the country's total, the latter being the greatest total forest area of the world. The construction of nature reserve districts in China started in 1956. The project built up 763 nature reserve districts with a total area of 61,184,000 hectares, more than 90% of which belongs to forest nature reserve districts. This was quite meaningful in terms of protection of forest resources. The Government commenced the construction of a forest protection system in the forest districts in 1950, and has basically built up a forest fire-retardant system and a system to prevent disease and insect damage to forests.
