Quenching China’s Water Thirst

December 24, 2009

By Joe Lamar

Fine to Lend a Little Water?

This demand-side solution faces fierce opposition. No province wants to accept a cut in water supplies at a time when they all want to boost industry and agriculture. The latter is by far the biggest drain on the river, accounting for 90 percent of the diverted water, some of which is taken hundreds of kilometres into the desert. Yu and his colleagues are dispatched to sluice gates during times of drought when the Yellow River Conservancy Commission has to impose a potentially life-determining judgment on water supplies. ‘It can be very dangerous,’ says Yu. ‘In the past, our engineers have been thrown into the river by angry residents. In the early days after 1999, nobody wanted to accept us. Upstream residents didn’t care about downstream demands. They said that, historically, they could always take what they wanted.’ Better regulation of demand is the best option, but upstream provincial governors are also reluctant to accept tough controls on a resource that they have always taken for granted.

A politically easier solution is to increase supply, even if it means huge expense, waste and environmental stress. The centrepiece of the government’s efforts to solve China’s water problems is the Rmb400-billion South-North Water Diversion Project. First proposed in 1962 by Mao Zedong, who said it was ‘fine to lend a little water,’ the giant plumbing operation aims to divert water along three routes from the historically moist Yangtze basin in the south up to Beijing, Tianjin and other thirsty cities and industrial belts north of the Yellow River. Like the Three Gorges Dam to which it will be connected, the diversion is an engineering marvel that has been pushed through despite concerns by environmentalists and many residents of the affected areas. About 300,000 people will have to be relocated and swathes of farmland will be dug up for trenches.

At Jiaozuo, a 40-minute drive north of Zhengzhou, engineers from the 16th Bureau of the China Railway Construction Group are working on the most complex section of the central route: a 4-kilometre tunnel that will take 9.5 billion cubic meters of diverted water under the Yellow River. Giant drills have already completed half the work. At the foot of the construction shaft, the nine-metre wide concrete pipe stretches into the dark far below the farm fields beside the bank of the river. ‘This is a first in the history of the Yellow River. Nothing compares with it,’ one of the engineers, Han Jiping, says proudly.

Outdated Plans

Further inland, a 40-metre-wide channel is being cut through the red earth, part of a course that will eventually stretch from the Han River in the Yangtze basin up to Beijing. Construction has been delayed because of environmental concerns. Du Yun, a geologist with the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics at the China Academy of Sciences, has warned that the diversion of a third of the water in the Danjiangkou reservoir will raise the risk of pollution, sedimentation and flooding on the Han, a Yangtze tributary. To offset these fears, the government has earmarked an extra Rmb8 billion for four projects to bolster the Han, including a diversion of water from the Three Gorges reservoir on the Yangtze and along the Xinglong Hinge. These measures–essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul–will require digging at least 650 kilometres of new channels through farmland. Many people in Hubei feel they are losing out.