Staring up from the bottom of the deepest pipe in the world’s most ambitious plumbing operation, the view is that of a frog in a well: a small distant disc of sky. Look again two years from now, and you would see a torrent of water apparently defying gravity as it surges up the 39m shaft first toward the heavens, then to Beijing and other thirsty cities.
The Guardian was the first foreign news organization to enter the pits and tunnels at Jiaozuo in Henan Province, which are at the center of China’s latest, greatest engineering project, the South-North Water Diversion Scheme. In the spirit of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) drive for “scientific development,” the aim is to engineer a solution to the most pressing environmental problem — the alarming depletion of water resources in the arid, heavily populated north.
More than twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam and three times longer than the railway to Tibet, the 50-year, US$62 billion project aims to channel a greater volume than the Thames along three channels — each more than 1,000km long — from the moist Yangtze basin up to the dry lands above the Yellow river.
At Jiaozuo, giant drills have already gouged out more than half of the 4km-long tunnel that will take the water under the Yellow river. At the foot of the construction shaft, the 9m-wide concrete pipe stretches into the dark far below the farm fields that stretch toward the river.
“This is a first in the history of the Yellow,” one of the engineers, Han Jiping, says proudly. “There is nothing to compare.”
The project has sparked so many ecological, financial and political concerns that government advisers are calling for the plan to be delayed and possibly curtailed, raising the possibility that this could prove a mega-project too far even for China. First proposed in 1962, the scheme was approved by Mao Zedong (毛澤東), who said it was fine for the south to “lend a little water,” but until recently the government has not had the money or technical ability to go ahead.
In the north, the disparity between supply and demand is evident across swaths of land that rely on the overworked and heavily polluted Yellow River. China’s second-biggest river accounts for 2 percent of the country’s run-off, yet irrigates 15 percent of the crops and supplies water to 140 million people, about 12 percent of the population.
Xinhua news agency reported last year that 4 billion tonnes of industrial waste and sewage were discharged annually into the river system, leaving 83 percent of the water too contaminated to drink without treatment.
Tang Xiyang, one of the founders of the green movement in China, is apocalyptic: “The Yellow river civilization has been destroyed. People cannot survive on that river any more.”
Yet the pressure on China’s “Mother River” grows as industrial parks and cities expand. The accumulated overuse of water in the Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei areas of northern China is estimated at 9 billion cubic meters. Water tables are falling and lakes evaporating.
Reducing demand has been difficult. At the control center of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission in Zhengzhou, water allocations are displayed on a wall-sized screen. Nine provinces share the water. Proportions have been fixed since 1987 based on an over-optimistic estimate that annual run-off is 58 billion cubic meters. This year, the volume is forecast to be less than 50 billion cubic meters. In 2003, it fell below 45 billion. Provinces are supposed to equally share the shortfall. Yet Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Shandong take more than 1 billion cubic meters of water above allocation every year without permission.
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