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NY Times June 1, 2011
Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern
By EDWARD WONG
DANJIANGKOU, China — North China is dying.
A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching
south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese
civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking
water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in
Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground
aquifers that took millenniums to fill.
Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive
solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year
hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze,
to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million
people.
The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion
Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It
would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet
the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62
billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is
the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that
project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent
problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in
concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the
sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those
in richer cities.
Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport
precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly
afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50
years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle
route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir
and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being
relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far
from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands
of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.
“Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched
woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a
bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being
flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted
to leave.”
About 150,000 people had been resettled by this spring. Many more
will follow. A recent front-page article in People’s Daily, the
Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said the project “has entered a key
period of construction.”
Some Chinese scientists say the diversion could destroy the
ecology of the southern rivers, making them as useless as the
Yellow River. The government has neglected to do proper impact
studies, they say. There are precedents in the United States.
Lakes in California were damaged and destroyed when the Owens
River was diverted in the early 20th century to build Los Angeles.
Here, more than 14 million people in Hubei would be affected if
the project damaged the Han River, the tributary of the Yangtze
where the middle route starts, said Du Yun, a geographer at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the provincial capital.
Officials in provinces south of Beijing and Tianjin have privately
raised objections and are haggling over water pricing and
compensation; midlevel officials in water-scarce Hebei Province
are frustrated that four reservoirs in their region have sent more
than 775 million cubic meters, or 205 billion gallons, of water to
Beijing since September 2008 in an “emergency” supplement to the
middle route.
Overseers of the eastern route, which is being built alongside an
ancient waterway for barges called the Grand Canal, have found
that the drinking water to be brought to Tianjin from the Yangtze
is so polluted that 426 sewage treatment plants have to be built;
water pollution control on the route takes up 44 percent of the $5
billion investment, according to Xinhua, the official news agency.
The source water from the Han River on the middle route is
cleaner. But the main channel will cross 205 rivers and streams in
the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing.
“When water comes to Beijing, there’s the danger of the water not
being safe to drink,” said Dai Qing, an environmental advocate who
has written critically about the Three Gorges Dam.
“I think this project is a product of the totalitarian regime in
Beijing as it seeks to take away the resources of others,” she
added. “I am totally opposed to this project.”
Ms. Dai and some Chinese scholars say the government should
instead be limiting the population in the northern cities and
encouraging water conservation.
The project’s official Web site says that the diversion “will be
an important and basic facility for mitigating the existing crisis
of water resources in north China” and that sufficient studies
have been done. Wang Jian, a former environmental and water
management official with the Beijing government and the State
Council, China’s cabinet, agreed that the project “carries huge
risks,” but he said there were no other options given the severity
of the current water shortage.
The middle route is to start major operations in 2014, and the
eastern route is expected to be operational by 2013. The lines
were originally supposed to open by the 2008 Summer Olympics, but
have been hobbled by myriad problems.
The diversion project was first studied in the 1950s, after Mao
uttered: “Water in the south is abundant, water in the north
scarce. If possible, it would be fine to borrow a little.”
In a country afflicted by severe cycles of droughts and floods and
peasant rebellions that often resulted from them, control of water
has always been important to Chinese rulers. Emperors sought to
legitimize their rule with large-scale water projects like the
Grand Canal or the irrigation system in Dujiangyan.
After the initial studies in the 1950s, the government did not
look seriously again at the project until the 1990s, when north
China was hit hard by droughts. In 2002, the State Council gave
the green light for work to start on the middle and eastern
routes; the western route, which would run at an average altitude
of 10,000 to 13,000 feet across the Tibetan plateau to help
irrigate the Yellow River basin, has been deemed too difficult to
start for now.
Officials in Tianjin are so skeptical of the eastern route’s
ability to deliver drinkable water that they are looking at
desalinization as an alternative. Planners have more hope for the
middle route, though the engineering is a much greater challenge —
the canal has to be built entirely from scratch, with 1,774
structures constructed along its length to channel the water,
since there is no pre-existing waterway like the Grand Canal to
follow.
At the start of the route, the water level of the Danjiangkou
Reservoir on the Han River has been raised 43 feet to 558 feet so
that the water can flow downhill to Beijing. The government said
the rising waters and a need to combat soil erosion necessitated
moving 130,000 farmers last year from around the reservoir.
Similar relocations are taking place all along the main channel,
which runs through four provinces.
About 1,300 residents of Qingshan township have been moved to
Xiangbei Farm, desolate land where a prison once stood. The
villagers now live in sterile rows of yellow concrete houses 125
miles east of their abandoned ancestral homes. A government sign
in the middle of the settlement says: “The land is fertile and has
complete irrigation systems.”
The farmers know better. Each person is supposed to get a small
plot of land free, but the soil here is well known to be
exceedingly poor. The people also complain that in the
government’s compensation formula, their old homes were
undervalued, so many have had to pay several thousand dollars to
buy new homes.
“There’s nothing here,” said Huang Jiuguo, 57. “There’s no
enterprise. Our children are grown, and they need something to do.”
For three days last November, thousands of residents of a
resettlement area in Qianjiang city blocked roads to protest
poorly built homes and lack of promised compensation, according to
a report by Radio Free Asia. Officials ordered the police to break
up the rally, resulting in clashes, injuries and arrests.
Forced relocations, though, could pale next to larger fallouts
from the project.
“We feel that we are still unsure how the project is going to
impact on the environment, ecologies, economies and society at
large,” said Mr. Du, the geographer in Wuhan, who carefully added
he was not outright opposed to the project.
The central question for people in Hubei is whether the Han River,
crucial to farming and industrial production hubs, will be killed
to keep north China alive.
In a paper published in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Mr. Du and two co-authors estimated that the diversion
project would reduce the flow of the middle and lower stretches of
the Han significantly, “leading to an uphill situation for the
prevention of water pollution and ecological protection.” Though
the study first appeared in 2006, the government has not altered
its original plan, Mr. Du said.
Central planners decided on the amount of water to be diverted
based on calculations of water flow in the Han done from the 1950s
to the early 1990s; since then, the water flow has dropped, partly
because of prolonged droughts, but planners have made no
adjustments, Mr. Du said. The amount to be diverted is more than
one-third of the annual water flow. “That will exert a huge
damaging impact on the river,” he said.
The Han River is already facing enormous challenges — industries
are discharging more and more pollutants, companies are dredging
sand to feed construction needs in nearby cities and algal bloom
has hit the river hard. The diversion of water to Beijing will add
to the pressures. “If the water quality cannot be ameliorated
effectively, the aquatic life populations will be further
decimated,” Mr. Du and his co-authors wrote.
The diversion from the Han is necessitating more complex projects
to raise water levels. One side diversion brings water from the
Yangtze to the Han. Another would bring water from the Three
Gorges reservoir to the Danjiangkou reservoir.
Government officials in the south are keenly aware of the changes
coming to the Han. In Xiangfan, officials have shuttered some
small factories like paper producers and forced others to use more
nonpolluting materials, said Yun Jianli, director of the
environmental advocacy group Green Han River. “The local
government is very concerned about the river and impact of the
diversion project,” she said.
The political conflicts are obvious. Mr. Du, a member of the
provincial consultative legislature, said officials in Hubei had
been in constant negotiations with officials in Beijing for
compensation. In the 1990s, the central government proposed a
package of water projects valued at $50 million at the time to
help Hubei. After rounds of negotiations, the current proposal for
supplemental water projects is estimated at more than $1 billion.
The demands of the north will not abate. Migration from rural
areas means Beijing’s population is growing by one million every
two years, according to an essay in China Daily written last
October by Hou Dongmin, a scholar of population development at
Renmin University of China. “With its dwindling water resources,
Beijing cannot sustain a larger population,” Mr. Hou said.
“Instead, it should make serious efforts to control the
population, if not reduce it.”
Beijing has about 100 cubic meters, or 26,000 gallons, of water
available per person. According to a standard adopted by the
United Nations, that is a fraction of the 1,000 cubic meters, or
260,000 gallons, per person that indicates chronic water scarcity.
The planning for Beijing’s growth up to 2020 by the State Council
already assumes the water diversion will work, rather than
planning for growth with much less water, said Mr. Wang, the
former official.
City planners see a Beijing full of golf courses, swimming pools
and nearby ski slopes — the model set by the West.
“Instead of transferring water to meet the growing demand of a
city, we should decide the size of a city according to how much
water resources it has,” Mr. Wang said. “People’s desire for
development has no end.”
Li Bibo, Jonathan Kaiman and Jimmy Wang contributed research from
Beijing.
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