(Submitted to State Forest Administration, PR.China)
Abstract: China’s state-owned forest sector has been through and still facing with great challenges for a long period. Since 1986, the State Council and Forestry Administrations of China have provided solutions specifically and repeatedly for the issues of state-owned forestry enterprises. In order to mitigate the severity of forest resource crisis and economic crisis, both managers and employees have vigorously attempted for a series of institutional changes in forest resource management, silviculture, management diversification, and forest products processing. Valuable experiences are accumulated. Since the Natural Forest Protection Project, which was implemented in 1998, the Chinese government has changed its forestry policy to give pivot support to main state forest areas, instead of more exploitation than investment. Hence, the long-standing contradiction in this sector has been eased. What’s more important, it provides great opportunity for state forest areas to explore new institutional and mechanism reforms, and to achieve sustainable development. This report is structured in four sections. Section 1 reviews the status quo of natural resource management and economic growth. In section 2, the reforming steps and practices in state-owned forests are presented, followed by still-existing problems in section 3. Finally, section 4 concludes and provides some policy implications.
