There is no manual to specifically help Chinese officials tackle the problem of the giant dust bowl spreading from the country's northwest. Yet if there is one book that might reveal the consequences of their inaction and patchy efforts on the growing crisis, it is John Steinbeck's classic tale of hardship The Grapes of Wrath.
The 1939 book, which won America's highest literary honour, a Pulitzer Prize, and contributed to the author being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a work of fiction.
But there is nothing fictional about the spreading deserts and increasingly destructive dust storms that Siberian winds blast across the north of Asia, carrying airborne particles to neighbouring countries and over the Pacific to North America.
The Grapes of Wrath records the social instability that resulted from decades of poor farming techniques on North America's Great Plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Overgrazing by animals and the removal of grass during ploughing led to the exposure of fertile topsoil to the elements. A severe drought in the 1930s created a dust bowl and winds sent choking clouds of midwest US soil to Chicago and New York. More than 2 million people, already challenged by the Depression, were forced off the land.
An identical situation is unfolding in China today. Northwestern deserts, aided by a severe drought, are advancing towards north-central regions including Beijing at a rate of 3,650 sq km a year. Deserts comprise about 18 per cent of the mainland's land area and desertified land another 4 per cent.
Government-led schemes since the 1950s - cultivation, grazing, deforestation and irrigation - have helped giant dunes up to 400 metres high shift forward, swallowing all in their path and forcing tens of thousands of people to move. The United Nations has said 400 million Chinese live in areas threatened by desertification.