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Let 10,000 rare plants be preserved

He and his team raced against time to rescue the wild plants from the rising water and by mid-2004 had succeeded in preserving nearly 10,000 rare plants of 175 species in the botanical garden. However, lack of money prevented him from employing qualified technicians for better management of the garden.

After Premier Wen Jiabao issued instructions on the matter in April 2005, the Chongqing municipal government made three decisions: build a highway leading to the garden; draft an overall plan for financial support to be submitted to the central government; and include the garden in the local government budget.

Not one of the decisions has been implemented. The reasons? There were a number of them: bureaucratic inaction; buck passing between government departments; and unwillingness to dig into the local treasury for a non-lucrative business; but most of all, the officials' indifference toward the protection of the rare plants.

Maybe the central government should allocate more money to help with the job. But the local government failed to draft, as it has promised, the required plan and application though two years have passed. And local officials did not do much to help Xiang despite his repeated appeals citing the premier's instructions.

A journalist who has followed Xiang's efforts for many years remarked: "He is too naive, thinking that he has won powerful support from the central and municipal leaders. He doesn't understand the rules - a distant supreme leader is not as substantially powerful as an immediate superior."