China's Water Woes—Page 3

There is perhaps no better way to get a sense of the challenges facing Beijing than to drive the highways that run along the SNWD's Central Line. In 1,200 km you pass through forgotten cities—huge by the standards of the rest of the world—that seem decades rather than mere kilometers removed from the capital. The route takes you through toll booths where packed buses disgorge cramped loads of travelers and government sedans race by, leaving speed limits in the dust. You pass few trees and not a single forest.

Heading south out of Beijing, the first thing that strikes you is the corn—growing in ditches along the road, bumping up against factories, against piles of garbage. The corn parts. You pass a red billboard that reads "Strengthen Water-Resources Management According to the Law." Just beyond the sign a dry reservoir comes into view, tall grass covering its bottom. Then you see the now pointless dam and, just above it, the bright-green Precious Prosperity golf course and a clutch of newly built suburban homes. The next things you notice are the invisible rivers. They are pointed out by signs: "The Hancun River Bridge," "The Liuli River Bridge," "The Sha River Big Bridge," "The Especially Big Bridge" over the Qin River. Without these reminders you might think you were just driving over more cornfields. Under other bridges a shadow of the water remains, a string of puddles or piles of sand shifting in the wind.

This spent topography owes its character both to China's current urban expansion and to changes wrought in the past. Chinese have been irrigating their agriculture by river diversion for millennia. But as recently as the 1950s, most of the many rivers on the North China Plain still flowed. That was the decade when Mao's enthusiasm for controlling nature led to the building of hundreds of dams along the Hai and the Huai, the region's main river systems, and others like them. Today, many of the reservoirs behind those dams have been requisitioned by city governments or industry, and peasants have turned to pumping groundwater—depleting half of Hebei's non-replenishable reserves, for example, in 50 years.

Just to the west of Baoding—the first major city south of Beijing—this history is being revisited. To supply emergency water to Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics, a spur of the SNWD will draw off a portion of Hebei's remaining good surface water until the full project is finished and water flows up from the South. The enormous trunk of the aqueduct, like an elevated highway with walls, is already blasting through the mountains with the corn thronging its fat legs.

Baoding, with a population of 10 million, has troubles of its own. To the east of the city is Baiyangdian, the largest freshwater lake in the region. Nine rivers feed this wetland dubbed the "kidney of North China," of which eight are now mostly dry. The last one must handle more than half of Baoding's sewage and industrial waste. In January, Baiyangdian began to buckle under this burden and suffered the largest fish kill the lake had ever seen. The disaster prompted Baoding to speed up the construction of a new sewage-treatment plant and today the lake is expanding its tourist services. Billboards along the road advertise the image to which the lake's guardians aspire: HUGE. ECOLOGY. HEALTH. RECREATION.

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