Tree-planting has become a way of living for Chinese people today with millions of citizens involved as volunteers making the country greener.

Trees planting is a bit of a tradition, marking the beginning of children's schooling, one's enrollment of colleague in army service, or for a wedding or as birthday commemoration.

Many trees are planted in special places for civil servants, professionals, model workers, journalists, and Party members to help raise public awareness of environmental protection.

"Each spring - citizens have a duty to plant trees - there will be dozens of places open to the public for tree planting in urban areas, particularly in metropolitan areas like Beijing and Shanghai," Zhou Lijun said, an official with the National Afforestation Commission (NAC) in Beijing.

Most places provide free planting kits, and people can buy different kinds of saplings there for 20 to 40 yuan (US$2.40 to US$4.80) each a little bit more.

In rural areas "planting more trees to get rich" has been very popular since farmers can sell some of their adult trees to make money and improve their living standard.

People are also allowed to pay for tree-planting if they are too busy to attend afforestation season events, NAC experts say.

Over the past two decades, people from all walks of life have participated in tree-planting since China set March 12 as a National Tree Planting Day in 1979 and launched the national voluntary tree-planting campaign in earlier 1980s.

According to the 1981 resolution by China's top legislature on the campaign, every healthy Chinese citizen older than 11 has a duty of planting three to five trees each year without pay.

Last year, nearly 560 million people planted more than 2.5 billion trees throughout China. The accumulated efforts of volunteers reached 8.8 billion with more than 42 billion trees planted during the 1982-2003 period, NAC's statistics indicate.

To date, the area with human-planted trees across China has exceeded 46 million hectares, ranking first in the world.

(China Daily March 12, 2004)