China's sandstorm center has moved eastward, said the country's environment monitoring station in a report released in Beijing Monday.  

A sandstorm, starting Saturday in western Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has affected approximately 70 million people in 11 provinces and autonomous regions. It is the eighth one this year.

The report acknowledged that sandstorms monitored in northwestern Gansu Province and western Inner Mongolia, two of China's three major sandstorm centers, contain only one fifth or sixth of the sand of that before. However, sand storms in the other center, northeast Inner Mongolia, contain 24 times the particles of the standard.

The report also noted that little sand in the wind is brought cross borders. Instead, they usually come from the local land surfaces.

The sandstorm has become a grave environmental scourge of northeast Asia. Almost every year from March to May since the late 1990s, strong cold winds from Siberia blow up a huge volume of yellow dust from the Gobi desert in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and north China.

(Xinhua News Agency March 30, 2004)