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China officials caught spray-painting grass green in Chengdu

The grass actually is greener in the south-western Chinese city of Chengdu, but only because it has been dyed.

Chinese workers spraying the grass green in Chengdu  

In China's sprawling smog-blanketed cities, life can sometimes seem a little grey. But Chengdu's officials hit upon an easy solution to cheer up their city's appearance: specifically, a chemical solution called Top Green Turf Greening Agent.

Chinese reporters filmed workers from Chengdu's municipal landscaping department as they busily painted the grassy verges of the city's roads with a fluorescent green spray.

"Two workers were spraying the grass, turning the yellow grass into green. Were they painting the grass?" said He Tao, a Chengdu resident, to the China Daily newspaper. "Wouldn't that pollute the environment?"

Not according to Mr Yang, a salesman for Top Green, the makers of the dye.

"It is absolutely not toxic. It is just a green dye. We have been selling it to the Chengdu government for at least five or six years, and we have lots of other government clients, like the city of Tianjin, and many north western provinces. And we also sell it to golf courses," he said.

 According to Top Green's website, the colour "lasts for ten to 14 weeks and is not washed away by the rain". It adds: "It also turns the soil green".

But some residents found the dye also turned their shoes green as they walked across the city's newly lush lawns.

The landscaping department declined to comment on the use of the dye, but said earlier to Chinese journalists that the chemical was a "nutrient fluid" to help keep the grass alive during winter.

But Mr Yang, the salesman, said there were "no nutrients" in Top Green's dye. "Maybe they added some," he speculated.

The Communist party has a long history of similar Potemkin projects designed to project a harmonious image of China.

When Chairman Mao went on inspection tours of the countryside, fields of crops were uprooted and replanted along his route so he would see a landscape of thriving fertility.

More recently, fake sheep were installed on the ravaged grasslands of Inner Mongolia to convince tourists that they still grazeable.

In areas blighted by quarries, entire mountains have been painted green in order to seem verdant from the air. "This is very advanced, we learned how to do it from the internet," a spokesman for a local mining office in Shaanxi province said, when confronted.

In Chengdu, locals were aghast at the lengths their officials would go to in order to beautify the city. "Why do they not use the money to build schools?" asked Wu Tingyu, a resident, on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.

"Who are they trying to please?" asked the official Weibo of Changhong, a giant Sichuanese electrical equipment company. "Do they think it is like dying your hair?"

Meanwhile, one comment translated by ChinaSmack, a blog, asked: "Can you also dye the sky blue?"

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