Chairman, Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the Ninth NPC

Standing Committee Member, Ninth National People¡¯s Congress (NPC)

Gao Dezhan, as an award-winning senior engineer who now chairs the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the NPC, China¡¯s legislative body, is tackling the serious issue of China¡¯s deforestation, caused primarily by excessive and indiscriminate logging in violation of government-set quotas, and the failure of many afforestation efforts due to lack of scientific guidance about which kinds of trees to plant and how to ensure their survival.

Deforestation has led to erosion along riverbanks, which causes the accumulation of silt in the rivers. This in turn causes the water level to rise above China¡¯s protective dyke system, with catastrophic results for low-lying farmland and villages. The floods in the summer of 1998 were one of the worst in living memory. Gao and his committee have been touring the country and urging the government to enforce the newly revised (in 1998) Forestry Law of 1984, and protect forest resources.

Leadership Posts

Gao Dezhan¡¯s career developed in Jilin Province. In 1975, he became chief engineer and deputy director of the Petrochemical Bureau of Jilin Province, posts he held until 1980, at which point he moved to the Jilin Provincial Economic Committee, which he directed until 1981. His provincial politics career culminated in terms as vice governor and then governor of the province, which posts he retained from 1981 to 1985.

Gao has also been the deputy director of the National Greening Committee, and spent 1987 to 1993 as Minister of Forestry. Moreover, Gao was a deputy to the Eighth National People¡¯s Congress, and in 1998 rose to the status of member of the Standing Committee of the Ninth NPC, which duties he executes while also meeting the responsibilities of chairmanship of the Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee.

Gao has comparable experience in the Party apparatus. He served as deputy secretary of the CCP¡¯s Jilin Provincial Committee from 1985 to 1987. He spent 1993 to 1997 as secretary of the CCP Tianjin Municipal Committee.

Gao earned a place as alternate member to both the Twelfth (1982) and Thirteenth (1987) CCP Central Committees, comprised of the cream of China¡¯s political leadership, and was promoted to full membership for the Fourteenth CCP Central Committee in 1992. He also became a delegate to the Fifteenth CCP National Congress in 1997.

Background

Gao Dezhan is a native of Qixia, Shandong Province, where he was born in 1932. At the age of 18, he joined the CCP, a year after the People¡¯s Republic of China was established, and attended the Dalian Engineering Institute, where he completed his degree in the Chemical Industry Department in 1954.

Gao served as director and engineer of the Technical Office of the China Sugar Refinery from the year of his graduation until 1958. He then became deputy chief engineer and vice president of the Jilin Provincial Petrochemical Design Institute, where he spent the years 1961 to 1976. In 1993 he won a gold prize for greening science and technology.