WATER CRISIS

The drying up of China

China's water crisis has serious economic and ecological implications for itself - and the world.

Jehangir S. Pocha

It's easy to mistake the long but otherwise incongruous looking bridge just outside Luoyang city in Henan province as a monument to China's endemic corruption. At first sight, it appears to be built over nothing but an expanse of dry field which could easily have been crossed with a normal road.

It's only after one travels a bit down its 3-km length that one realises that it is in fact a monument marking China's decaying environment. For a kilometre along the bridge, one suddenly sees the Hwang Ho, or Yellow River, running below, and one realises it was to span this river that the bridge was originally built. It's just that the river has shrunk to about one-third its original size, leaving wide, dry embankments on either side as it ebbs apologetically down the narrow centre of its original river bed like some anonymous provincial tributary.

"Once, if it rained a lot, the water would even touch the bridge," says Wang Tong, a local taxi driver. "But the water's disappearing". Wang speaks softly, almost in disbelief, and says it still seems unimaginable that the mighty Hwang Ho "which we always used to see drawn on all maps" could disappear.

Indeed, the 4,700 km-long Hwang Ho, and the 6,300 km-long Yangtze River further south, have been the cradles of Chinese civilisation for over three thousand years. Even today, the Hwang Ho, which rises in China's far west, is the major source of water for northwest and north China. It provides water to over 12 per cent of China's population across 50 large and medium-sized cities before emptying into the Bohai Sea in the east. Well, almost emptying. For three years straight, starting in 1995, the river did not reach the coast. In 1997, it reached up to Kaifeng City in Henan Province, about 800 km from its mouth. Decent monsoons in 2002 and 2003 helped the Hwang Ho reach its delta once again. Today, from the bridge, we can see little boats bobbing along the river and the sailors smile and wave at us. But the river's volume has shrunken by a third, and its speed has slowed by half, down to less than 50 cubic metres per second.

That's the story across much of China, where numerous water sources are running dry. Apart from shrinking rivers, a recent survey revealed that the water table beneath the North China plain, where 40 per cent of China's grain is produced, has fallen five feet in the last five years. After five years of drought, Chinese officials have become so desperate that they are using airplanes, rocket shells and anti-aircraft guns to shoot cloud-seeding chemicals into the air. From 1995 to 2003, the nation spent $266 million on rainmaking technology.

The World Bank and the Washington DC-based Worldwatch Institute say the problem is burgeoning water consumption in China's towns coupled with reckless industrial and agricultural use. This perfect storm of economic and environmental factors, they warn, could exhaust China's strained water resources, and trap the country in a new 'Dry Age'.

Giant Problem

From a staid but functional office at the headquarters of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower in Beijing, Wang Hao, the institute's director, says "water shortage is one of the most serious challenges" looming over China's swelling prosperity and population. "I think about it night and day," he says to no one in particular as he paces around the bulky conference table in the room. The series of numbers he reels off to amplify the problem are so stark that they almost make an idle sipping of the bottled water at the table feel like a guilty pleasure.

Though China currently has the fifth-largest water resources in the world, given its population of 1.3 billion, the country's per capita water supply is only 2,200 cubic metres - 25 per cent of the global average. By the Chinese government's own admission, water supply is expected to fall to 1700 cubic metres per person, which the World Bank calls the 'danger level', by 2030. During the same period, the demand for water is expected to jump from 120 billion tonnes a year to 400 billion tonnes.

Using uncharacteristically strong language, the World Bank has warned that the situation "will soon become unmanageable with catastrophic consequences for future generations."

Four hundred of China's 668 cities are suffering from water shortage, according to government reports. Predictably, the quantitative fall in China's water resources has also been accompanied by a fall in the country's water quality. The World Bank says three-fourths of China's rivers are polluted, and over 700 million of China's 1.3 billion people drink contaminated water.

Though China's western provinces such as Gansu and Shaanxi have always been parched (in the worst regions, some people say they have literally not bathed for a decade), even northern regions are now facing shortages.

Hubei Province in central China was poetically called the 'Province of a Thousand Lakes'. But today, leaping industrial demand for water in this economically supercharged region has turned 815 of these once pristine lakes into sandpits. Seen from the air, the once fecund ground looks arid and angry, and this change is spreading across the area. In many indigent villages across China's northern regions and Mongolia, locals who rear sheep and other animals for a living say the encroaching desert has eaten into traditional grazing grounds, forcing them to move several times. Scientists estimate that within 20 years, such desertification could spread across a region the size of France.

In many rural provinces, the circumventing of traditional occupations and livelihoods because of water shortages is causing riots, raising the spectre China's leaders fear most - political instability. The current regime in Beijing has little in common with the peasants' and workers' revolution, in whose name it still rules. But the fact is that it still uses old rhetoric to cling to power, and the bulk of the People Liberation Army is primarily recruited from rural areas.

In 2002, thousands of farmers in the Yellow River basin of China clashed with police over a government plan to divert water to cities and industry. Numerous clashes like this have been reported across the country.

Not far from the Yellow River Bridge, residents near the Xiao Langdi dam, China's largest water-management project on the Hwang Ho, say they forced authorities to stop the dam from generating electricity to increase the irrigation water supply when the area was plagued by drought in 2001. Still, with the river having shrunk by half, there just isn't enough water. "I think we could grow two, maybe three rounds of crops here every year (but) we only get water for one," says Lu Zheng, a local farmer.

As peasants unable to make a living off the land are migrating to cities and shrinking the local tax base, local authorities are often raising taxes on those who remain. This then drives them to leave, or protest violently. With concerned Central government authorities in Beijing warning village councils against indiscriminately taxing farmers, thousands of villages are sinking into decay and destitution.

Further, denying water to industry has also had its share of consequences, and not just economic ones. Numerous Chinese industries, particularly heavily water-dependent ones such as power generation, say they are concerned with maintaining their global competitiveness and growth in the face of falling water supply, rising water prices and increased release of water to farming areas. Analysts warn that with job-generating economic growth being one of the primary handles China's Communist Party leverages to stay in power, the prospect of urban recession combined with rural unrest could be very frightening.

Giant Solution

Beijing's response has been to launch another of its mega public works projects, one that will transfer 50 billion cubic metres of water from the Yangtze River in the south, to the drying Hwang Ho, Huai and Hai rivers in the north every year.

"Eighty per cent of China's water lies south of the Yangtze but this region has only 53 per cent of the population and 36 per cent of the farmland," says Hao, at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower, whose institute will be closely involved in executing the project. "Hence transferring water from the south to north makes perfect sense."

The project, first conceived by Chairman Mao in the 1950s, entails ploughing three separate channels about 800 miles long between China's flood-prone south and the arid north. It would join China's Three Gorges Dam and 3000-mile Qinghai-Tibet Railway as one of the world's largest, and most controversial, public works projects.

Environmentalists say the $25-billion project, which is scheduled for completion in 2009, will force over 250,000 people to be relocated and damage delicate eco-systems. Some even fear it will cause the Yangtze itself to run dry. Even the official State Environmental Protection Agency has warned the government that "most countries no longer undertake large-scale cross-watershed transfer projects because they are very expensive and have severe environmental consequences".

While the World Bank says that the environmental issues facing the project can be addressed, and that in some places the project could actually mitigate river pollution, it warns that the project could prove futile unless China fundamentally changes the way it consumes and manages its water.

Indeed, China does not act like a nation in the midst of a water shortage. Taps run freely everywhere because the government subsidises water supplies, especially to farmers.
Industrially, China's water consumption efficiency is one-tenth that of developed countries. And only 25 per cent of China's industrially-used water is recycled, mostly because local governments are loathe to burden local firms with costly recycling rules.

The vice-minister of water resources, Zhai Haohui, admits that China loses more than 30 billion cubic metres of water every year, causing a $28 billion loss in industrial output. Poor irrigation facilities have also meant that China exploits just 25 per cent of its irrigation potential. Zhai, one of the reformers within government, says he is committed to making the tough decisions needed to correct the situation.

One of the ministry's more innovative moves has been to encourage government-funded organisations, such as the China Women's Development Fund (CWDF), to take on grassroots level water management projects. Qin Guoying, CWDF's deputy director, says her organisation has spent over $11 million to help almost a million families build water collection wells in western China.

Zhai says his ministry has also introduced water conservation and recycling programmes, and will raise the price of water supplied to farmers and industry through the water transfer project.

This is essential as some 1,000 cubic metres of water from the Hwang Ho river costs the same as a 1.5-litre bottle of mineral water.

The Asian Development Bank has been working with the government on water pricing, and a pilot project in Zhangjiakou, a northern Chinese city, found that raising the price of water by 40 per cent and employing a progressive pricing plan rate for individual and corporate users allowed water consumption in the city to fall by nearly 14 per cent over two years. Majority of the reduction came from factories, which instituted water recycling programmes.

Steps are also being taken to arrest the rapid deforestation and soil erosion taking place across the country. Hydropower, which creates large evaporating reservoirs, is increasingly being complemented with wind power.

Meng Xian Gan, director of the China Solar Energy Institute in Beijing, says: "China is on track to generate 10 per cent of its power from wind and solar energy by 2010." Innovative programmes to desalinate sea water using solar energy are also in place in numerous cities, says Meng.

Lingering Concerns

But none of this is likely to be enough, and the consequences of China's massive water problems are expected to spill over borders, creating regional, even global consequences.

Despite Beijing's attempts to keep water flowing to its farmers in the middle and long run, the imperatives against doing this are just too strong. Today, agriculture uses 70 per cent of China's water, producing relatively little in return. For example, in China, a thousand tonnes of water produces one ton of wheat, worth perhaps $200. If the same amount of water is used in industry, it could generate up to $14,000 in additional output, according to experts. With China desperate for economic growth and jobs, and flush with over $600 billion in foreign exchange with which to buy food in the global market, it makes perfect sense for the country to divert its water away from food production and buy grain from the world market.

Worldwatch's Lester Brown calculates that water shortages could cut China's annual agricultural output by 9 million tonnes. Though China can afford to make up for this shortfall by buying grain in the world market, Brown warns that such purchases would push up world food prices, something he describes as 'life threatening' for the world's 1.3 billion poor who live on less than $1 a day. In short, falling water supply in China could mean rising food prices for the entire world, including India.

Some security experts also say that China's thirst for war could lead it to divert regional rivers, and bring it into conflict with several of its neighbours, including India. Diplomatic sources in Beijing say they are already worried by China's damming of the Mekong River, which it shares with Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and its diverting of water away from those countries.

Indian security experts fear a similar run-in with China because many of them say Beijing is toying with the idea of damming and diverting rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej, which are critical to India, Pakistan, and Burma, but which originate in Chinese-controlled Tibet.

Tensions over what exactly China is doing to Tibetan water sources crested in July 2000 when satellite imaging from the Indian Space and Research Agency (Isro) confirmed that a flash flood which killed over 130 people and destroyed property worth $20 million in Arunachal Pradesh had been caused by a breached dam in Tibet.

A similar tragedy occurred in Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh in August 2000 when more than 100 people died and 120 kilometres of a strategic highway in the Chini sector and about 100 other bridges were washed away by another flash flood caused by what Beijing called another 'natural' dam collapsing. The multi-crore Nathpa-Jhakri 1,500 MW hydroelectric project on the Sutlej River was also severely damaged. Satellite imaging from Isro also confirmed the cause of the flood to be a breached lake in Tibet.

With China not allowing Indian scientists to visit the Tibetan lakes, there have been murmurings in security think-tanks that Beijing might be experimenting with water-diversion projects in the area. Recently, Chinese engineers further unnerved India and much of the world when a group of them at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics in Beijing proposed using nuclear explosives to carve a canal that would divert the Brahmaputra's waters into northern China. Though the government was quick to publicly distance itself from the idea, experts say it revealed the thinking in Chinese circles.

The possibility of all this triggering 'water wars' may seem far-fetched, but it has not stopped the US National Intelligence Council, the umbrella over all US intelligence agencies, to begin monitoring China's water situation closely. "In China," says Meng, "water could end up being more important than oil."

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