On the water front
Nine hundred billion tonnes of water flow down China's greatest river, the Yangtze, every year. On the way, it powers the world's biggest hydro-electric scheme, slakes the thirst of 400 million people and serves as a rubbish dump for a growing number of supercities, factories, farms and ships. Jonathan Watts traces its path from source to sea
Thursday November 11, 2004 The Guardian
Meng and Ma are one of Shanghai's most impressive double acts. They don't crack jokes, they don't sing and dance - at least not in office hours. No, they do something far more basic: one pours, the other flushes. Not just glasses, or cisterns, but entire lakes of water. More than 5m cubic gallons a day.
They are the Mr In and Mr Out of the city's water system: Meng Mingqun, the lean, polished and bespectacled deputy director of the water supply administration, is the straight man who turns on the taps and fills the city's glasses with chemically treated water. Ma Yuandong, the portly, cheerful, moon-faced director of the municipal drainage administration, is more like a slapstick clown, pulling the plugs and flushing away the smelly leftovers.
Although their act has to be repeated tens of millions of times a day, it ought to be one of the simplest in municipal administration, because Shanghai is triply blessed with water: it sits at the junction of the nation's biggest river (the Yangtze), an impressively large tributary of that river (the Huangpu), and the world's biggest ocean (the Pacific).
Yet that blessing is in danger of becoming a curse because of the speed at which China is fouling its waterways. After 25 years of the fastest development the world has ever seen, the country is unsurprisingly hailed as an economic miracle. But it is not hard to find the downside: all you need to do is peer down a sewer, taste a drop from almost any river, or consider where a glass of Shanghai water comes from.
Shanghai is the wealthiest and most environmentally conscious city in China, but its thirst has never been harder to quench, nor its effluent harder to manage. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping first launched his economic reforms, the population of Shanghai was 12 million. Today official figures put it at 13.5 million, although unoficially it is closer to 20 million. Its thickening forest of skyscrapers means that water is now being pumped up to altitudes of more than 400m, while the resultant waste - 5,300,000l a day - spreads out across a 6,500km-long sewage network that Ma's office has expanded at the rate of about 80km a year. Over the next five years, they will build 16 new waste-treatment plants, in addition to the existing 20. And still they can't keep up. More than a third of the city's sewage is dumped in rivers untreated. "The problems are so huge," says Ma, "that sometimes I can't sleep at night."
Meng's job is only partially easier. His workers lay 2km of new pipes every year, while more than six new purification plants have boosted water supply capacity to 7,160,000m3 per day. He earnestly assures me that Shanghai's water is so purified that it is not only drinkable, but among the highest quality urban water in China. I'll take his word for it, but few locals seem to. A glass of Shanghai water is tinted a faint yellow, smells of chlorine and tastes like something you'd rather not swallow - most people boil it, or buy bottled water.
Four-fifths of the city's drinking water currently comes from the Huangpu which reflects the bright lights of the Pudong skyscrapers and art-deco colonial buildings on the Bund, but it has become so dirty and expensive to treat that Meng says the city will soon have to start taking half its supplies from the more distant Yangtze. The trouble is that China's environment is being ruined so quickly that even a glass of water from the mighty Yangtze may soon not be much of an improvement.
Better known in China as the Chang Jiang, or long river, the Yangtze has always been a symbol of power and prosperity. Traders - first in sampans, wupans and junks, later in imperial gunboats and international container ships - have made fortunes on its waters, buying and selling rice, tea, opium and coal in the crowded cities on its shores. Countless millions have lost lives and livelihoods in its famously treacherous waters and devastating floods. Challenging the Yangtze was a test of virility and vitality for an aging Mao Zedong, who first swam its width at the age of 64. For the Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai, it was a metaphor for loss and impermanence:
"That shadow is his lonely sail. Now it is gone, all the blue is empty now.
"All you can see is that long, long river that flows to the edge of the sky."
For thousands of years, that journey - 3,964 miles (6,379km), uninterrupted by a single dam - remained unchanged.
These days, by the time it has reached Shanghai, it has supported 400 million people, or one in every 15 people on earth; driven the turbines of the world's biggest hydroelectric plant, the Three Gorges dam; been sucked up and spat out by a growing cluster of super-cities, polluted by countless new factories, fish-farms and reclaimed farmland; and buffeted by heavy river traffic that now includes container ships, speedboats and tourist liners. It begins with some of the world's purest water and ends so corrupted that the WWF says the Yangtze delta has become the biggest cause of marine pollution in the Pacific.
full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1348274,00.html --
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
