On Sustainability’s Updates

Water in China: Desperate Measures

The Economist | Original Article | From the Print Edition: Leaders

Rivers are disappearing in China. Building canals is not the solution.

China's emperors regarded control over water as one of the principal ways of controlling the country. They poured their kingdom’s resources into vast projects such as the Grand Canal between Beijing and Hangzhou, which was finished in about 500AD. The country’s Communist leaders have inherited this passion. Eight of the nine members of the previous Politburo’s standing committee were engineers and a former president, Hu Jintao, was a water engineer. The country has built as many large dams as the rest of the world put together.

The Grand Canal now forms a link in one of the biggest engineering projects the world has ever seen, whose first stage is due to open by the end of this year. It goes by the unlovely name of the South-North Water Diversion Project (see article). If it is ever finished it will move water along 2,000 miles of new canals, some of them across the Himalayan plateau, from the Yangzi in the south to the Yellow River in the north, at a cost of more than $50 billion.

Unlike some of China’s recent infrastructure extravagances, the diversion project addresses a serious problem. China is dangerously short of water. While the south is a lush, lake-filled region, the north—which has half the population and most of the farmland—is more like a desert. The international definition of water stress is 1,000 cubic metres of usable water per person per year. The average northern Chinese has less than a fifth of that amount. China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. A former prime minister, Wen Jiabao, once said water shortages threaten “the very survival of the Chinese nation”.

The shortage is worsening because China’s water is disappearing. In the 1950s the country had 50,000 rivers with catchment areas of 100 square kilometres or more. Now the number is down to 23,000. China has lost 27,000 rivers, mostly as a result of over-exploitation by farms or factories.

Water shortages impose big costs. China is hoping for a shale-gas revolution but does not have enough water for it since most of the gas reserves are in the driest parts of the country. The World Bank puts the cost of China’s water problems—mostly damage to health—at 2.3% of a year’s GDP.Read More...