"We can see from the present situation that after many years of crackdowns, crimes relating to destroying forest resources ought to have been bought under control," said Zhang Ping, deputy head of the State Forestry Administration's police division. "Cases do still happen, and some are very serious," she told a news conference. "When they do, our attitude is certainly to strike hard, and investigate every case."

Tropical areas including the southwestern province of Yunnan, which borders Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar, as well as China's frigid northeast where forest cover is extensive, still have problems with illegal logging, Zhang added.

China embarked upon a national tree planting campaign in 1982 to reverse years of indiscriminate logging during the environmentally-blind early era of Communism.

A fifth of China's land mass is expected to be forested by 2010, up from around 18 percent today and less than 10 percent 50 years ago, forestry officials have asserted.

But environmental groups have accused China of plundering forests in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, and that the country is at the heart of a global trade in illegal timber it sells to markets in the United States and Europe.