Yesterday in Weihai, east China's Shandong Province, blowing sand from the Gobi desert necessitated a "yellow" wind alert.

The new section of Ordos city on the edge of the Gobi desert was designed to accommodate about 300,000 people but residents say fewer than one-tenth of that number live in Kangbashi.

As if to remind you how environmentally unfriendly you are being by skiing here, the pistes are often a pale beige, regularly dusted as they are by fine sand blown in from the nearby Gobi Desert.

Such large dust storms are common in China, but the storms usually happen in the spring, when fronts from Siberia sweep southeast across the Gobi Desert.

In China, where the Gobi Desert is growing by 10, 400 square kilometers (4, 000 square miles) a year, the refugee stream is swelling.