At 1,335 kilometres from Beijing, the train reaches Yinchuan station in the Muslim-dominated Ningxia Province. This is where the great Mongolian steppes give way to the ancient deserts of western China.

Hongsibao and its forty-two satellite villages were created from scratch eleven years ago. Previously, only the cannons of the People’s Liberation Army rolled over the soil of this immense gravel expanse. Since then, Hongsibao has become the largest city of ecological refugees in China, inhabited by 200,000 peasants and herders moved there from the dry mountains.

Hongsibao is the jewel of what the Chinese government calls “ecological construction.” This consists in reshaping the country’s landscape to save endangered ecosystems and lift out of poverty the millions of Chinese left behind after thirty years of economic boom.

Ecological construction can take one of two forms: either the authorities close fragile ecosystems to human activities, returning them to nature by creating protected areas, or engineers construct entirely new agricultural ecosystems by pumpingin water from the Yellow River, which traverses the northern deserts and steppes. But the once-mighty Yellow is now at risk of not reaching the sea anymore as a result of excessive pumping and climate change, so the engineers are designing a system of canals that will fill it with water redirected from the Yangtze River, which floods the south of the country.

The view along the road to Hongsibao is so desolate that it is hardly surprising to see a prison set up on its outskirts. With its air of a company town, Hongsibao has everything: a wedding dress shop and one for designer jeans, a “one hour” photo lab, a huge market square with open-air billiard tables strangely wrapped in plastic sheets, an enormous Soviet-inspired plaza illuminated by postmodern streetlights. There is even a two-star hotel where officials receive generous foreign donors.

In Mrs. Ma’s courtyard, copper-cheeked children jump rope. This new Hongsibao resident recalls, “In the mountains, we had to rely on the Old Heaven for water!” She has been an ecological refugee since her village was deemed part of a protected zone. “I miss the mountains’ panoramic scenery. But we prefer our new house,” says the former cave dweller. The UN has classified her native region as one of the most inhospitable to human life on Earth. People are said to bribe officials to be registered on the lists of displaced people.

Outside, a dust storm rises, paralyzing Hongsibao as well as the rest of the northwest all the way to Beijing, a reminder that ecological construction hasn’t been achieved yet.

Back in Inner Mongolia Province, along the Alashan Left Banner route, hundreds of kilometres of fences prevent access to pastures. Mud huts where shepherds once lived are falling into ruin.

The local government is currently carrying out a large forced resettlement operation there. The objective has been to move 80 percent of the region’s shepherds — 40,000 in total — from the degraded prairies to artificial oases (where they are taught how to raise cows and grow vegetables) between 1989 and 2010. In front of one model village, a billboard announces, “For people resettled due to the ban on grazing, 20 million yuan [$2.8 million] were invested to build greenhouses, paddocks, barns, and houses.”

A woman on the main street refuses to give her name, much less agree to be photographed, but she is willing to speak. “The ban on grazing should last five years,” she says. “We receive subsidies while we wait. But we’re afraid of not recovering our land after the ban.”