China, which has far too little forest to meet its wood needs, is one of, these, and thus the particle board industry there is in a period of rapid expansion. In 1982 I had an opportunity to visit China as an FAO adviser in this field. What follows is a brief and partial summary of China's particle board industry, with a glimpse of what it is doing in the other panel board sectors, plywood and fibre-board. All the information was provided by the Chinese Academy of Forestry and is therefore official. An industry needs to be seen, first of all, in the context of a larger economy which includes the resources that are essential to its growth - or the scarcity of these same resources.
China today is in the midst of an extremely ambitious reforestation and forestation campaign.
It remains to be seen whether or not the goals of this effort will be achieved. By the year 2000, the aim is that 20 percent of the country should be forested. Every Chinese citizen has been asked to plant a quota of at least four trees each year. To understand how ambitious these targets are, it should be appreciated that at the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, only about 8.6 percent of China's 9.6 million km- of land mass was forested. Because of this.