Wed, Dec 17, 2014 page8

• Project helps water woes, at cost

  • By Jonathan Kaiman
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  On Friday afternoon last week, China quietly inaugurated one of the biggest engineering projects of all time: the South-North Water Diversion, a US$75.16 billion, 2,400km network of canals and tunnels designed to divert 44.8 billion cubic meters of water annually from China’s humid south to its parched, industrialized north.

  At 2:32pm that day, the project’s “middle line” officially began carrying water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei Province to Beijing — a distance equivalent to that from Corsica to London. Officials say the project will save China from a water crisis that could set its development back years.

  It has also destroyed Wang Yanhe’s life. Wang was born near the Danjiangkou Reservoir in 1979, married young and had two children. The family lived between a small stream and a leafy hillside, and grew a variety of grains. In 2009, seven years after the project was approved, officials informed him that the reservoir’s water levels were rising and that his village would be submerged.

  About 345,000 villagers have been displaced by the project to date and Wang soon became one of them. The government gave him a home in the Heba New Migrant Village by a dusty highway in rural Pingdingshan, a coal-rich municipality in neighboring Henan Province whose name translates to “flat mountain.”

  Then came the drought. This summer was Pingdingshan’s driest in 63 years — Wang’s corn crop grew to only knee-height, forcing him to abandon his harvest.

  “Nothing is as good as before,” he said, chain-smoking cigarettes in his concrete-floored living room.

  His roof leaks, he cannot speak the local dialect and officials promised him about 809m2 of land, but gave him only 607m2.

  “After we arrived, we realized that the land was all dry,” he said. “So it doesn’t even matter what they promised us.”

  The Henan Daily announced the line’s inauguration in a pithy microblog post on Friday last week.

  “Being a peoples’ engineering project, in keeping with a frugal and pragmatic working style, celebratory activities will be kept as simple as possible,” it said. “No officials will take part in the ceremonies.”

  China’s economic boom over the past three decades, coupled with a long-held mandate to “grow first, clean up later,” has been cataclysmic for the country’s once bountiful lakes, rivers and aquifers. More than half of China’s 50,000 rivers have vanished over the past two decades, according to the country’s first national census of water, which was published last year. About 70 percent of its remaining fresh water is polluted.

  “If we continue with our business-as-usual model, China will basically run out of water,” said Hu Feng (胡鋒), a water analyst with the Hong Kong-based research group China Water Risk. “It won’t have enough water to power its economy.”

  The project has roots in an offhand comment former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) made on an inspection tour in the early 1950s: “The south has plenty of water, but the north is dry. If we could borrow some, that would be good.”

  The project has three sections: a 1,150km eastern line that runs from the lower Yangtze River to Tianjin; the middle line from Danjiangkou to Beijing; and a western line, which could some day link the headwaters of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers across the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

  The eastern line began delivering water to coastal Shandong Province last winter. The western line remains largely conceptual, so grand in scale that it may ultimately prove impossible to build.

  While the project could provide some much-needed relief, it “will never solve north China’s water problem,” said Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Wilson Center in Washington.

  She called the project a “Band-Aid” rather than a long-term solution.

  “The challenge in the water sector, writ large, is that it is so hooked into supply-side management,” she said. “It’s like the engineers in China have a special tattoo that says ‘nothing is too big’ — they’ll move water massive distances rather than get deep and dirty into the mess of pushing effective water conservation.”

  In February, Chinese Vice Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Qiu Baoxing (仇保興) called the project unsustainable.

  “As the scale of the project gets bigger and the distance gets longer, it is more and more difficult to divert water,” he wrote. “Recycled water could replace diverted water. Most Chinese cities are capable of finding more water if we develop water desalination technology and collect more rain water.”

  Experts say the south may no longer have enough water to spare. They say the project could decimate the Han River, an important tributary of the Yangtze, as about 40 percent of the river’s water will eventually be diverted north, despite acute water shortages that already plague the cities along its banks.

  In 2011, five months of drought in Hubei left 315,000 people short of drinking water. The Danjiangkou Reservoir dropped to 4m below “dead water” level, rendering it unusable.

  Speculation that the project caused this year’s drought grew so heated that state media issued a denial.

  “Henan Province is the recipient of benefits from the [project],” Yang Biantong (楊汴通), a spokesman for Henan’s flood control and drought relief department, told the People’s Daily in late August. “Not only has it not had a negative effect, the [project] has also been extremely helpful.”

  Christine Boyle, founder of Blue Horizon Insight and an expert on China’s water issues, said the issue boils down to how one defines a drought. In addition to crippling weather droughts — periods of little rainfall — China is also suffering from economic droughts, which occur when the demand for water outstrips supply.

  “You can’t say the South-North Water Diversion is causing a weather drought,” she said. “But you can say it’s intensifying an economic drought.”

  Many Chinese farmers are already economically squeezed and increasingly erratic weather patterns — freezing winters, blistering summers, floods and droughts — are now pushing them into a state of emergency.

  The South-North Water Diversion project began sending emergency water supplies to Pingdingshan in mid-August and, according to Xinhua news agency, the diversion was a success. The middle line delivered more than 50 million cubic meters of water to the city’s Baiguishan Reservoir over a month and a half, “effectively relieving the scarce water supply of Pingdingshan city’s 1 million-plus residents,” it said.

  While that water has flowed into the taps of Pingdingshan’s urbanites and the cooling systems of its coal-fired power plants, farmers on the city outskirts have been left to fend for themselves.

  Chang Xiangdang, 40, lives with his family of six in Malou Village, a dense cluster of cinderblock houses only a few hundred meters from the project’s main channel populated by 1,000 people. From his small patch of radish and cabbage, high concrete embankments stretch to the horizon and an arch-like sluice rises like a mirage.

  “The channel runs through our town, but there’s no way to get the water, no gap in the wall,” he said.

  Villagers rely on groundwater for bathing and cooking. In previous years, they could dig just 20m to reach the aquifer. This year, even 80m wells are running dry.

  Chang said the lack of water has thrown his life into flux. Like Wang, he has given up on this year’s corn harvest. His family has been subsisting on a compensation package that project officials gave him four years ago, when they requisitioned much of his farmland. He said another dry summer would leave him destitute, so he has considered taking a construction job in the city.

  “There’s no more water here,” he said. “I’ll do what it takes to survive.”

  Jonathan Kaiman is a journalist for the Guardian newspaper.
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