At a Beijing airport on Tuesday, retired American teacher Ronald Sakolsky embraced his longtime Chinese friend Yin Yuzhen, a pioneering desertification fighter, before boarding a flight home. Both were in tears.
Twenty-six years earlier, Sakolsky had supported Yin with her efforts to turn the sands of Inner Mongolia green. Upon his return this time, he found not only trees stretching across the dunes, but also a friendship that had quietly endured across the decades.
A NEW SAPLING, 26 YEARS ON
The long-awaited reunion took them back to the very place where Sakolsky and Yin's friendship first took root -- the Maowusu Sandy Land.
Back in 1999, Sakolsky was teaching in China when he caught a television report about Yin and her tireless efforts to plant trees in the sandy land. Moved by her determination, he contacted more than a dozen organizations across the United States and eventually raised 5,000 U.S. dollars to support her cause. Yin used the money to buy more than 50,000 saplings and plant them in the sand.
When Sakolsky first set foot on this patch of sand in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 2000, the saplings were so fragile that he doubted they would survive. "This is impossible," he had told Yin then.
Yet on Aug. 24, 2026, as Sakolsky visited the Maowusu again, rows of poplar, pine and cypress rose from the dunes as far as the eye could see. The barren sands he remembered had become an ecological oasis.
Walking towards a poplar he had planted with Yin 26 years ago, Sakolsky couldn't believe his eyes. "That tree? Oh, my goodness. When I planted this tree, I never expected it would grow this tall."
Later, in front of the forest, they planted a new sapling together. "Plant a Tree of Friendship in Inner Mongolia," read a sign nearby. Sakolsky signed his name on the sign while the sea of green behind them embraced the young tree. "It's like a newborn baby," he said.
So far, including the trees funded by Sakolsky's efforts, Yin and her family have planted trees across 70,000 mu, an area roughly the size of 6,500 standard soccer pitches. Poplars, oriental arborvitaes, spruce and Mongolian Scots pines now rustle in the wind as birds chirp.
Official figures show that about 85 percent of the Maowusu has been restored. Between 2021 and 2025, China accounted for roughly one-quarter of the world's increase in green vegetation and rehabilitated approximately 152 million mu (over 10 million hectares) of sandified land.
RETURN TO THE CLASSROOM
Sakolsky's kindness in planting green was but one chapter of his time in the country. His real stage, back then, was the classroom of a school in central China's Henan province.
On Aug. 29, he returned to Luoyang Foreign Language Junior Middle School. On a classroom blackboard were the words: "Welcome home, S." Seeing his former students before him, Sakolsky's eyes welled up. He pointed to the "NEVER" printed across his T-shirt and said, "I have never forgotten you."
In 1999, during a one-year teaching exchange program, Sakolsky first came to this school. Some of his former students have since become teachers themselves.
"A teacher teaches a student, the student becomes a teacher, and more people learn education," he said. "In this unit I plant a seed, it becomes a tree, more trees become a forest."
Over the years, through the program, more than 300 Chinese teachers have traveled to the United States to teach in primary and secondary schools. Meanwhile, over 100 U.S. educators have come to China for teaching exchanges.
At a China-U.S. teacher exchange event on Monday in Beijing, Sakolsky met representatives from both sides of the program.
Zhou Xiangli, a teacher from Peking Academy High School, remembered staying with Sakolsky's family during her U.S. exchange. "They welcomed me without reservation and called me their 'fifth daughter,'" she said.
With Sakolsky's support, she visited more than 20 local schools during her time in the U.S., sharing a real, multi-dimensional picture of China with American children.
These exchanges, small as they may seem, are part of a much larger story. They have added another thread to the long history of goodwill between the people of China and the United States -- from the American volunteer pilots who fought alongside Chinese forces during World War II to the historic visit of a U.S. table tennis team to China in 1971 and, more recently, the Philadelphia Orchestra's decades of performances in the country.
"The Chinese people opened their arms to me," Sakolsky said. "What ties us all together is the love they have given me."
