First-time visitors to Beijing can rarely resist the Great Wall. And more often than not, they visit the Badaling section. The reason is obvious: Badaling, the first section of the Great Wall to open to tourists, is closest to the city.

As a top tourist destination, the 7,600-meter-long Badaling section of the Great Wall has borne the brunt of vandalism and erosion, with recent media reports highlighting damage caused by vehicle exhaust, name-carving and litter. The 2,000-year-old solemn serenity is also disrupted by the constant noise of nearby motor vehicles, holiday resorts and amusement facilities.

The news broke on April 15 that the city government's Badaling Special Zone Administration had seized the right to manage Badaling from its former partners citing new legal regulations in its support.

With the new agreement, the Badaling Special Zone Administration, an accredited representative of local government, will now be solely responsible for all tourism and conservation at Badaling.

"The regulatory job becomes a unified operation. And the responsibility is clear," said Li Shuwang, deputy director of Badaling Special Zone Administration.

Li outlined the new work ahead:

Tree planting and planning for commercial ventures near and on the wall;

Setting up consistent signs near the wall;

Repair and consolidation of the unopened parts of the Great Wall under its care;

And, upgrading the display and exhibits at the Great Wall Museum.

"We shall carry out the regulatory work with conservation at the core. Tourism will be developed on the basis of conservation. Revenues will no longer be the chief objective," said Li.

The first indicator of potential change at Badaling came in 2002, when China revised its Law on Protection of Cultural Relics. Then in 2003, Beijing introduced the Administrative Regulations on Protection of the Great Wall.

The 2002 State Law rules that the right and responsibility of caring for the country's cultural relics rests with governmental cultural relics regulatory institutions. But in reality, government organs like gardening, tourism and state-owned companies often share the rights, if not the responsibility.

"The great value of the Great Wall is its great size of 10-thousand plus li," said Dong Yaohui. Dong ought to know: He walked the entire length of the Wall, west-east, between 1984 and 1985. He's probably the first known Great Wall-walker since the founding of modern China. From his own experience, Dong said about one third of the Wall remained in reasonable shape, another third was in ruins, and the rest was gone forever.

The conditions of the different sections of the Great Wall vary as does the standard for its conservation, said He Shuzhong. He argues that the unique complexity of the Wall merits a special law dedicated to its preservation. Local regulations are of limited effectiveness. National regulations were submitted at the end of 2004 for approval by the State Council, which promised to deal with the issue as a priority for this year. The regulations are likely to be released this coming summer, He believed.

"The law alone is certainly not enough," he said. "but (when problems arise in the future) at least you will have a law to turn to."

The new Law on Protection of Cultural Relics clearly states that all ticket income should be used for preservation. The Badaling Special Zone Administration has pledged to do this. But this situation differs from other sections of the Wall, according to He. Ticket revenue in other sections is often used to pay for anything but conservation.

"Government funding for Great Wall conservation has increased in recent years," said He Shuzhong. "But overall, there are still too many debts. "

Funding was not the biggest problem, said Dong Yaohui. The most important issue was awareness. The government and the general public need to realize the importance and urgency of protecting the Great Wall.

The task has much to do with national pride and patriotism. "The Great Wall has great historical value, and it is endangered, dying out," Dong said.

The China Great Wall Society, a Chinese non-government organization that champions restoration of the Great Wall, has organized a 35-day tour for journalists starting at the end of April. They reported on the state of Wall sections from Shanhaiguan in the east end to Jiayuguan in the west.

A clear definition and assignment of responsibilities was also important, said Dong. Many Great Wall sections mark the border between provinces, counties, towns and villages. The result is many sections have become neglected.

The China Great Wall Society is pushing for an adopt-a-wall scheme with tablets erected every kilometer citing who is responsible for each section of the Ming wall. In remote areas, said Dong, peasants might be mobilized to perform guard duty. Companies had already expressed an interest in sponsorship, he said.

Preservation means nothing without accountability, said Dong. He urged failing officials to be punished. Take the case of a road construction company from outside Baotou, Inner Mongolia. To make room for its 96 million yuan (about 10 million dollars) new highway, the company demolished a section of the Zhao Great Wall built in the Warring States (475-221 BC). The company was fined 80,000 yuan (about 10,000 US dollars) in 1999. "Such a joke-like, meager fine is in effect a green light for demolition," he said. Or in October 2004 when part of the Pingyao ancient city wall collapsed, local officials blamed it on the poor quality of the 400-year-old architecture. Nobody was ever held accountable.

Law enforcement must be intensified, agreed He Shuzhong. That means making conservation of the Great Wall part of a government official's assessment, ranked on his official record. Government departments like human resources and discipline supervision should get in on the act, He said.

Greater publicity is needed to educate people, helping them understand the great value of the Great Wall and the severe, irrecoverable damage inflicted upon it by humans, said Dong Yaohui. He depicts the damage as coming in two waves of destruction since the founding of New China in 1949: The first wave hit between the 1950s and 1980s, when governments throughout China encouraged and even organized the dismantling of the Wall. Since then, he suggested, destruction has been largely nongovernmental.

Dong Yaohui recalled from a recent survey he had conducted that one farmer pointed at the Great Wall and asked, "What's the use of this stuff?" Dong suspects that in some underdeveloped rural regions, peasants continue to pilfer bricks from the Wall to build roads, houses and pigsties. One section of the Great Wall in Wanquan county, Zhangjiakou had been converted into a 1,000-plus meter ditch before local media attention ended the digging. Amateur renovation often does more harm than good. And "restored" Great Wall gleams, like the infamous section at Bai Yangyu in Hebei Province. "Just short of putting a porcelain coat on it," Dong said.

"Too often people see only the exploitable value of the Great Wall and not its historical value," said Dong. The rare cases where the Wall has been well-preserved, he said, came about either because it was in a remote, treacherous area or because that particular section was associated with mystic tales of revenge-seeking demons.

Dong Yaohui has been with China Great Wall Society since its inauguration in June 1987. First as secretary general, now executive vice president, he has spent almost two decades calling for Great Wall preservation.

While much of his publicity efforts focus on promoting ethical conduct among tourists, Dong said he believed many amateur graffiti artists were well aware of their wrongdoing. On Badaling Great Wall, most graffiti is in Chinese, but there are occasional notes in Indian, Japanese and Korean. And the messages themselves suggest that many of the vandals are university students, professors even.

In a country where many much more serious illegal acts go unpunished, the deterrence value of any law seeking to punish vandals is inevitably compromised, said one observer, who declined to be identified.

The vandals and the conservationists form only tiny minorities, said Dong. When it comes to the Great Wall, the vast majority of the population remains indifferent. Most people witnessing carving take it for granted, he said, and the media did not consider it an issue. Dong called on people who laud the Great Wall as the symbol of Chinese pride to honor their grandiose statements and sentiments.

Last year, the Society sponsored a hotline soliciting suggestions for repairing the damage to the wall caused by name-carving. Hundreds of proposals were collected, but none considered feasible. "The damage was irreparable and we already knew that in advance," said Dong. "The real purpose of the event was to call public attention to the issue."

Starting from the main entrance, walking either north or south of the Badaling Great Wall, almost every brick has been scratched by a knife, key, pointed stone or hairpin. Carving decreased after 1997, according to the Society. This might have been due to enhanced public awareness, or simply because there was no accessible space left for vandals to bring their artistic instincts into play.

Among the suggestions collected via hotline last year was a proposal for furnishing special brick or wood plaques on the Wall for tourists to do their own paid carving. In this way, the adviser said, people had a vandalism-free opportunity to express their pride of conquering the Great Wall and becoming "a hero".

The Great Wall was listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage site in 1987. It was later placed on the World Monuments Fund list of the World's 100 Most Endangered Sites.

"Just as the world does not belong only to human beings, the Great Wall does not belong only to China," said William Lindsey, a passionate promoter of Great Wall conservation efforts ever since he walked the entire length of the Wall 1986-87. Lindsey now heads the International Friends of the Great Wall, an NGO dedicated to its conservation.

Speaking at a press conference in July 2002 for the signing of a cooperative memorandum between Beijing government and the International Friends, Kong Fanshi, deputy director of Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau, said they recognized that preservation of the Great Wall did not merely mean repairing. He said the Bureau would also try prevent human damage, prevent the invasion of modernism and to preserve the environment around the Wall.

"The prospects are bright, " said Dong Yaohui. "Growing media reports of Great Wall problems are not the result of increasing damage, but a reflection of growing public concern and enhanced awareness. This will help solve the problem of conservation and exploitation."

A recent public appraisal by 31 Chinese newspapers produced a list of 50 tourist places worth visiting most by foreign tourists. The number one spot was the Badaling Great Wall.

(Xinhua News Agency June 6, 2006)