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Persistent efforts to return land reclaimed from lakes over the past five years have enabled the country's largest freshwater lake, the Poyang Lake, which had shrunk to nearly half of its original size due to land reclamation, to be restored to an area of 5,100 square km and the Dongting Lake, the second largest freshwater lake, to return to its size of 60 years ago.

A recent survey showed that the water surface of the Poyang Lake has been extended from 3,950 square km five years ago to 5,100 square km at present and the water surface of the Dongting Lake has been enlarged by 35 percent to 4,350 square km. The goal of returning land to the lakes is to control potential flooding of the Yangtze River, said Sun Xiaoshan, a deputy to the National People's Congress and director of the Jiangxi Provincial Bureau of Water Resources.

He recalled that the extraordinary floods of the Yangtze River in 1998 submerged large tracts of farmland around the Poyang and Dongting lakes region and along the middle and lower reaches of the river, causing a direct economic loss of 134.5 billion yuan (US$16.26 billion). The major cause of the floods, according to water experts, was the shrinking of lakes and the sharp decline in the holding capacities of lakes along the Yangtze River.

According to Sun, more than 413,000 hectares of land were reclaimed from the Poyang Lake in the 1950s alone. The result was that the shore lines of the lake were shortened by nearly half and the holding capacity of the lake dropped by 4.5 billion cubic meters. The Dongting Lake, an important area for flood diversion and storage on the Yangtze River, shrank by some 30 percent in its water surface.

China initiated a drive to return land to the lakes after the Yangtze River flooding in 1998.

Over the past five years, the government invested 10.3 billion yuan (US$1.24 billion) to finance the project, with 3.67 billion (US$443 million) injected into the Poyang Lake project and 2.5 billion yuan (US$302 million) into the Dongting Lake project.

The number of people relocated for the projects is 1.4 times that relocated to make way for the Three Gorges project.

The expansion of the two lakes has helped improve the environment in the areas along the Yangtze River. The water surface of the mainstream of the Yangtze River has been restored by over 1400 square km and the water storage capacity has increased by 13 billion cubic meters, said Sun.

Water experts attributed the great mitigation of the losses resulting from the severe floods in the summer of 2002 to the efforts to reinforce dykes and restore land reclaimed from lakes.

(Xinhua News Agency March 4, 2003)