DRAINING THE SOUTH

BY DAVlD DAWSON

DRAINING THE SOUTH

BY DAVlD DAWSON

Mao’s vision of “borrowing” South China’s water for the North comes to fruition

六十多年前，毛泽东在视察黄河时提出的“南水北调”构想在今天已经实现

When your capital city of over 20 million lies in a parched, semi-arid region, water problems are inevitable. Mao Zedong noted the problem back in the 1950s when he reportedly said, “Water in the south is abundant, water in the north scarce. If possible, it would be fne to borrow a little.”

“Borrow a little” has to be among the biggest understatements of the century. The realization of this vision is now known as the South to North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP, 南水北调) and is the largest water-diversion project in human history. As Britt Crow-Miller, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Portland University notes, “It is the equivalent of moving half of the Nile River from Cairo to Northern Syria each year.”

The government claims that the ongoing project, which consists of three routes and aims to move between four and 20 percent of the Yangtze River, will beneft over 500 million people. It has involved decades of construction, trillions of liters of water moved annually, and makes the Panama Canal look like a mere creek. With two of the three routes completed and a third still decades away, the project has already resulted in 330,000 people being relocated to make way for the canals.

The most recently completed stretch, which began construction in 2003 and fnished on December 27, 2014, was the central route, which stretches over 1,200 kilometersfrom the Danjiangkou reservoir in the Yangtze River basin toward Beijing.

The Eastern route fnished, without fanfare, roughly a year earlier in December of 2013. It also took around 11 years after starting construction in 2002. It stretches 1,467 kilometers from the end of the Yangtze River north toward Tianjin and Weihai, in Shandong Province.

The Western Route however, the most ambitious of the three, aims to boost fows to the Yellow River, and thus the North of China as well. It will effectively use water that comes from the Tibet plateau, but as yet there is no concrete forecast for when it will be complete. According to the government website on the project, the Western route will supply up to 20 billion cubic meters of water each year, via three sub-routes, from the Tongtianhe, Yalongjiang, and Daduhe rivers.

But, a project of such immensity was always going to come at a high cost, well beyond the dollar fgure. The offcial who oversaw the frst phase of the project between 2003 and 2010, told media that the cost of the frst phase blew out from 124 billion RMB to about 300 billion and that he was concerned that if pollution signifcantly affected the project, there may be little gain. Similarly, Beijing-based environmental advocate Ma Jun, upon the completion of the Eastern route, told The New York Times, “It’s not a moment for celebration. There should be a sobering review of how we cornered ourselves so that we had to undertake a project with so much social and environmental impact.” President Xi Jinping himself did not speak in celebratory tones when he urged authorities to learn from the frst section.

A PROJECT OF SUCH lMMENSlTY WAS ALWAYS GOlNG TO COME AT A HlGH COST, WELL BEYOND THE DOLLAR FlGURE

A sense of desperation permeates discussions surrounding water supplies to China’s northern metropolises, which have long been facing dire water problems. In 2013, Beijing’s Water Authority estimated that the city was consuming 3.6 billion cubic meters of water a year, while only 2.1 billion were locally available. The city’s massive increase in population was blamed, and now the city is ranked alongside locations in the Middle East in terms of water security. Water prices have been raised on a number of occasions, but they remain low by international standards, with painful price hikes considered politically unpalatable. NGO China Water Risk estimates that China will not be able to meet water supply requirements by 2030. A very big part of the problem relates to water pollution.

The recently completed central route, for instance, takes water from the Danjiangkou reservoir. In 2013, four of the fve rivers which feed that reservoir were so polluted that they were rated for agricultural use only. Since then, the authorities have been attempting to reduce the amount of polluters near contributing rivers, spending billions in the process.

“The pollution control tasks on the eastern route are the most formidable that I have ever seen,” Zhang Bo, the head of the Shandong Environmental Protection Department, was quoted by China Daily as saying.

The SNWDP project itself may also contribute to pollution. Kristen McDonald, China Program Director for Environmental NGO Pacifc Environment, points out that outtake areas for the water transfer “are likely to suffer increased concentrations of pollutants due to the removal of water.” She also pointed out that the project would directly affect ecosystems. “Construction of pipelines is another likely major area of impact, particularly for the western-most line, which crosses fragile mountain ecosystems. It is unclear to what extent adequate impact analysis is being done and [unclear on] the provision of mitigation measures.”

With China facing signifcant questions in regard to climate change and drought, such a long-term project of such massive scale was always going to be diffcult to forecast accurately. McDonald suggests that there should be greater emphasis on predicting the long-term impacts of the project.

“From what I understand, little is being done to examine how the water transfer will impact the long-term hydrograph of the Yangtze River and its tributaries. This should be examined alongside major plans for dam-building in the upper Yangtze River basin, as well as projections for climate change impacts in the region.”

“The big question is, does the Yangtze actually have enough water to support planned transfer amounts and planned hydropower capacity?” It is a question that offcials and scientists throughout China will no doubt continue to keep asking as the project continues, and North China’s water stresses continue to mount.