China's Water Woes
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.
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."
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.
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?"
Yes, she could. In 2001 Yun set up Green Han River, Xiangfan's first and only environmental NGO. The group's budget is less than a thousand dollars a year but its impact has been significant. Yun's members do what officials in Beijing can't: they regularly "walk" the rivers in their region, marching along them with flags and sleeping in tents near their banks. In addition to photographing the waterways?the Tangbai has been so badly polluted by effluent from paper mills that it has literally run black?Yun and her volunteers organize classes for schoolchildren, peasants and even government officials. Sometimes she just reminds people of what ought to be obvious: "We don't live in a desert. We're right next to a river. We ought to be able to use it."
Most people may call Yun "Granny," but she is as much an activist as a teacher. In 2003 she gathered several dozen bottled samples of polluted water, lined them up on the steps of the municipal water bureau, and told her story to other environmentalists around the country. Last year, her urgings prompted a national-level inspection of Zhaiwan, a village on the Tangbai north of downtown Xiangfan, and just south of the border with Henan province. The inspection confirmed that Zhaiwan's wells contained dangerous levels of highly carcinogenic chemicals. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reported the findings, factories upstream were shut down and, early this year, Xiangfan dug the village a new deep well to supply clean drinking water. "People like Yun Jianli are the drivers of positive change in China," says Alex Wang, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. NGO. "All countries that have dealt with their environmental problems to any degree have people like Yun?passionate, on-the-ground voices who will keep on working until things change for the better."
Sadly, Zhaiwan's fate also speaks to the limitations of groups like Yun's in modern China. Despite Beijing's attention, the Tangbai still stinks. According to Zhaiwan's Mayor, Zhai Jinghan, discharges of pollution regularly turn the water black, but his complaints upriver go unheeded "because the polluting factories are on the other side of the provincial border and we're not in their domain." Xiangfan's government shares his frustration. Wang Lei of the city's Environmental Protection Bureau says Xiangfan has worked hard to clean up its portion of the river. But it has no authority to enforce antipollution measures upstream. Although levels of several key contaminants have recently declined, he says, "There is still pollution coming from industry and household waste in Henan ... We have reported and appealed to Henan many times."
But the river is still far from clean. On Sept. 7, two to three hundred people with fish nets and baskets gathered at a bridge along the Bai, a feeder of the Tangbai, in Henan's Xinye county. Stripping to their underwear, they waded in, skimming off the dead and dying fish floating by in water that gave off an odor both acrid and sweet, like a mixture of tar and caramel. No one seemed surprised at the size of the fish kill. "It happens once a month," said Gua, 51. "The factories upstream discharge their wastewater. It makes the fish get dizzy or die. That's when we come fishing." (Officials in Xinye later said in a fax that the villagers' claims were "groundless ... all the dead fish you saw could have been the result of someone illegally poisoning the fish or bombing them or electrocuting them.") Yun stood on the bridge, and called officials in Xiangfan to warn them what was heading downstream. Then she told the people around her not to eat the fish. After about 10 minutes, she propped her chin in her hands and stared out into the rain. "This," she said, "is the tragedy of our rivers."
No one wants the story to end in a place like that bridge. And indeed, Beijing has seemed to feel a sense of urgency lately. Last month, Chinese officials announced they would invest $41 billion in sewage treatment and drinking-water purification, and set an ambitious goal: clean drinking water for the entire country by 2015. Whether the initiative will really penetrate China's smaller cities and townships remains to be seen. Many Chinese cities have sewage-treatment plants but lack the funds or the will to actually operate them. Cleaning up the water above all will require a cleanup of local corruption. In March China's National Audit Office announced that as much as 70% of funds allocated for water programs between 2002 and 2003 had been misused.
Still, not all is gloom. China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), long considered a toothless watchdog, recently announced plans to establish regional offices, which will nearly double its tiny workforce, now fewer than 200. Cautiously, Beijing has floated the idea of raising water prices. Ma Jun recently launched a website that gathers together, on a searchable map, all of the available official information about pollution of China's waterways. The map will give people like Yun a new source of hard data with which to bolster their calls for a cleanup. "SEPA can't be here every day to monitor these factories," she says, "To save a river you have to rely on the people along its banks." She's trying; so are thousands like her, all over Asia.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541354,00.html