China's Water Woes—Page 4

Around Handan, at the southern end of Hebei, a man-made landscape intrudes on the corn: piles of coal slag, smokestacks and gouged mountain faces. Clean water supplies here are among the scarcest in the region, and village after village has the same story: the water in the reservoirs is unfit to drink, what's usable goes to the city, the pumps suck deeper every year. In Yehe village, farmer Tian, 61, harvests millet with his family. Their drinking water, Tian says, comes from a communal well 360 m deep. "We can't afford to use this water to irrigate," he says. "We now rely on the sky. If it doesn't rain, we don't eat."

Tian won't be getting any water from the SNWD. Its cargo will be priced to reflect the cost of the project. Farmers won't be able to afford it and even if they could, preference will be given to urban residents. In theory, cities will give the cheaper water from old reservoirs back to the countryside—planners say that cities must demonstrate they're saving water before they can draw from the new aqueduct. But, says Ma, "If the situation of the cities is desperate, this policy will be very hard to enforce."

Harsh though it may sound, however, charging high prices for SNWD water makes sense. Currently 67% of China's water is used for agriculture, a sector responsible for only 13.2% of GDP. As California and Arizona have discovered, as an economy becomes urban, so water needs to be diverted from farmers to their urban cousins. That isn't easily done in places where courts are independent and local governments are held accountable at the ballot box. In China, the challenges are much steeper. Diverting water to the cities "may mean more civil unrest unless [China's leaders] can figure out how to use their water more efficiently," says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, a U.S. research institute. "They're in a really tough situation."

How will things get better? In time, perhaps, because of people like Yun Jianli, 62, a retired biology teacher and native of the city of Xiangfan, which lies about 90 km downstream of the Danjiangkou reservoir. The ancient walled city is moated by the Han River, which is stout enough that downtown Xiangfan's million residents both drink from it and use it as a sewer. But Xiangfan isn't going to keep all its water. Work is underway to raise the Danjiangkou reservoir's main dam so that it will catch more of the Han's flow. The reservoir will then spread and catch more water in rainy years. These reserves will then be channeled toward Beijing and the volume of the Han at Xiangfan will drop. The city plans to build a dam of its own to keep the water deep, but this will slow the Han, impeding its ability to rinse itself clean. Further complicating the picture is another river, the Tangbai, which empties into the Han upstream of the new dam and is severely polluted.

This rearrangement of nature worries environmentalists, but at least they have Yun on their side. She was riding a bus six years ago when a passenger pointed out a sewage pipe discharging its muck into a small stream. Yun had been a member of the Xiangfan branch of the Women's League and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, a government advisory body, and used her connections to visit the spot she saw from the bus. Before long she found herself making trips to other rivers, poking around factories, sniffing at the water. She was alarmed by what she saw, but at a loss for how to respond until she watched a news report about an environmental organization on a college campus in Guangzhou. "I had never heard the word NGO," she recalls. "I wanted to know: Could an old lady like me follow the example of these students?"

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