I hate China and don't trust them to be allowed to teraform, but the rest of the video was pretty cool after that.

It makes sense to be skeptical of news coming out of an authoritarian regime where information flows are carefully managed by the state. That said satellite imagery seems to show progress on holding back the desert and to me that is objectively good news.

Is it such a good thing? I'm real skeptical.

That desert has been seen contracting in at least the past 26 years, if not consistently, and it's been an inhabited desert for over 10,000 years. The only graphs I can see claiming the Gobi was rapidly expanding are on Great Green Wall propaganda articles.

If China continues to expand into the desert for profit it could lead to losses of history, culture, and habitat.

Does National Geographic count as a reliable source or is it all Green Wall propaganda?

Even the Archive of the page has the paywall, annoyingly https://web.archive.org/web/20260115182034/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/china-great-green-wall-gobi-tengger-desertification

Well their only citations are:

• One anecdotal account

• Feng Wang, associate professor at the Institute of Desertification Studies at the Chinese Academy of Forestry

• And the movie "Interstellar".

EDIT:

Attempts to scroll further before the paywall hit show even the Chinese scientists aren't in agreement, Xue stating that depleting groundwater tables could cause further deforestation and also:

"In 1994, China’s forestry administration started monitoring the status of desertification nationally. Their research shows that deserts expanded in China from 1994 to 1999, but they shrunk from 1999 to 2014. Still, some scientists have questioned the reliability of the state science data, citing methodological inconsistencies and discrepancies."