China's Water Woes—Page 2

Granted, nature and history have dealt China a tough hand: just 8% of the world's water, but 22% of its people. Added to that is a profound lopsidedness in distribution: 81% of China's water is in the southern part of the country, which has 57% of its population. This means the North has only 990 cu m of water per person—or 12% of the world's average. These are numbers so familiar in China that even schoolchildren can rattle them off. But alone, they don't spell doom. Other countries—Israel, Australia—have prospered despite dry climates. But governance is key. "What we really lack in China," says Wang Yongchen, a founder of the environmental nongovernmental organization Green Earth Volunteers, "isn't water. It's water management."

China isn't alone in facing a water crisis. Nations such as the U.S. have far from perfect records—more than a century of misguided policies encouraged farmers in the western U.S. to grow thirsty crops in what is essentially a desert. And China's size—plus the speed of its economic growth—means it is not always easy to apply others' lessons to its own circumstances. But there are things to be learned. Some countries have decided to conserve water for urban users and import food. Some have raised the price of water to reflect its scarcity value. In the West, grassroots groups, media campaigns and lawsuits have played a crucial role in spurring a cleanup of dirty water.

But China's leaders—wary of civil society and thus far unwilling to lean hard on local enterprises—have yet to embrace such measures fully. Instead, Beijing's primary focus has been on large-scale works like the South-to-North-Water Diversion (SNWD), a pharaonic engineering project with a $62.5 billion price tag, first conceived in 1952 by Mao Zedong. The scheme calls for three "lines" of canals and raised aqueducts that, if completed according to plan, by 2050 will carry 45 billion cu m of water from the wet South to cities in the parched North each year. That is a truck brigade writ large.

Workers began the Eastern Line, which runs from Yangzhou to Tianjin, in 2001. The Central Line, underway since 2003, will siphon a portion of the Han River, a Yangtze tributary, up through the provinces of Henan and Hebei and into Beijing to supply a projected one-fifth of the city's water by 2010. The Western route, as yet a pipe dream—complex, costly and environmentally risky—is intended to connect the headwaters of the Yangtze to the depleted Yellow River.

Few dispute that something needs to be done to avert crisis in the North China Plain—an area that is home to roughly 40% of China's population and produces about 40% of its grain. According to Jiang Liping, a water-resources expert at the World Bank, parts of the region are between 10 and 20 years away from running out of groundwater. Beijing, which has needed to divert water to meet its needs since the Yuan dynasty, 800 years ago, relies on reservoirs intended for agricultural use and on ever deeper wells.

But the SNWD has drawn criticism from those who say the big, expensive project has overshadowed more practical measures, like improving efficiency in irrigation, building a system of tradable water rights, and stopping pollution at the source instead of cleaning up later. Even the project's most ardent supporters agree that without improved environmental enforcement, it will fail to deliver what it promises. The canals of the Eastern Line have already become repositories of untreated sewage. Says Chen Zhikai, an engineer who has worked on the planning of the diversion for more than 50 years: "We can move the water. But if we can't control pollution, then we're just finished." Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and the author of China's Water Crisis, says, "People think [the SNWD] is going to solve everything. But it can't. It's just an emergency measure."

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