It’s pretty much a cliche nowadays among educated Chinese people that “Beijing is in the wrong place.” The nation’s capital is on the edge of a desert, and an advancing desert at that. The water shortage is getting quite dire. Two colossal canals are being dug to transport water to the capital from the Yangtze River, 700 miles to the south, but this will be a zero-sum game, depriving downriver Yangtze populations (for example, Shanghai) of water. I keep telling my Chinese friends their country should just build itself a new capital, as the Brazilians did. It would need to be somewhere wet–Hainan Island, perhaps. For a quarter century or more, the Chinese authorities have been trying to arrest desertification with programs of tree-planting. Results have not always been as intended. One of these new forests, just on the western outskirts of Beijing, caught fire last month: story here. That story also mentions the canal projects, near the end. They have had much less publicity than the Three Gorges Dam project, probably because the authorities son’t want to arouse criticism from environmentalists, affected citizens, and “the world community.” On the advancing desertification in remoter regions, stories like this are now routine.