CHIEN-MIN CHUNG / GETTY IMAGES FOR TIME

SLOWING THE FLOW: The Danjiangkou dam is being raised to catch more Han River water, which will go to Beijing

China's Water Woes
	Pollution, drought and vast deserts are all signs the country is struggling to manage its most basic resource
	By Susan Jakes

Posted Monday, October 2, 2006; 20:00 HKT
The first day the water truck came to Xiangshan village, the wells had already been dry for two months. Throughout the hills flanking the city of Chongqing and stretching south and west into Guizhou and Sichuan provinces, parts of China this summer suffered their worst drought in 100 years. In Xiangshan, a tiny mountain village high above the Qi River valley 150 km south of downtown Chongqing, residents had made do drinking from the muddy catchments in their fields. But by Aug. 24, when the truck set out on what was starting to become a routine delivery, those holes too were dry and Xiangshan's farmers had been forced to give up on irrigation. Pears hung hard and blistered on the trees. Sunflowers crumpled. The bamboo was brown.

Ao Minhong, a truck driver conscripted by the local government, was working long days. He filled plastic drums on his flatbed from a fire hydrant hooked up to the river. The Qi was listless that day and the liquid in the drums looked like weak tea. When he rounded a bend into Xiangshan after an hour's climb, he was mobbed. Li Caowan, a mother of two, worried the water wasn't clean. But she poured it into a ceramic tub in her yard anyway. "What choice do we have?" she said. "There's nothing else to drink."

The scene was familiar. In Harbin last November, it was fire engines plying icy streets lined with people holding buckets. Harbin's water had been contaminated with benzene from a chemical-plant explosion. In February, the trucks were in Sichuan, where a power plant discharged a toxic cocktail into the Yuexi River. And in September, when tap water for 80,000 in Hunan province was cut off because it had been tainted with an arsenic compound, the trucks saved the day once again.

But water isn't supposed to come on trucks. China's flair for contingency plans isn't reassuring. Rather, it's one of a growing number of signals that when it comes to dealing with this most basic of resources, the country is failing. Some 320 million Chinese lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Deserts cover 27% of the country's landmass. Most of China's surface water is unfit for human consumption, and some of that not even clean enough for industrial use. Grain production is sliding. And the Yellow River runs dry so often and so long that some scientists have argued that it ought to be considered a seasonal phenomenon. "China's water shortage and pollution problems are more severe than any other large country in the world," said Qiu Baoxing, Vice Minister of Construction, last month, "This is a critical point in time. We are at a crossroads."

That's the optimistic take; sometimes, though, it seems more like an approaching dead end. Already China's water woes undercut many of Beijing's most cherished aspirations: contaminated rivers not only swell health-care costs but increasingly generate domestic unrest. Continued droughts sap power supplies, ruin farmers and will eventually mean competition with other nations for grain. Moreover, providing citizens with the one precious resource that really does just fall from the sky is among the most fundamental duties we expect developed nations to perform. If China is to continue toward its goals of economic prosperity, social stability and stronger relations with the rest of the world, it will need to do better—and fast.

Continued...

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