According to reports in Chinese media, urban planners in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, have drawn up proposals to pipe water into the chronically parched region from Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake on Earth.
Li Luoli (李羅力), vice president of the state-run China Society of Economic Reform think tank who is one of the plan’s cheerleaders, said the megaproject — roughly the equivalent of pumping water from Lake Como to London — was both theoretically feasible and “certainly beneficial” to China.
“Once the technical issues are resolved, diplomats should sit down and talk to each other about how each party would benefit from such international cooperation,” Li said.
In a report this week, the state-run Global Times said the pipeline would quench the “desperate thirst” of a province that saw just 38cm of rain last year.
It would begin at the southwestern tip of the 600km-long Russian lake and run about 1,000km, across Mongolia, to Gansu’s capital through the Hexi Corridor, a desert region near the westernmost tip of the Great Wall of China.
The project would boost both Gansu’s “ecological environment” and its economy, which the newspaper said had been severely hampered by the lack of water.
The drastic plan underscores the severity of the water crisis facing Beijing.
China has 20 percent of the world’s population, but just 7 percent of its fresh water, with the north, in particular, facing a calamitous shortage thanks to urbanization, overuse, wastage and pollution.
In 2005, then-Chinese minister of water resources Wang Shucheng (汪恕誠) said that by 2020 many northern cities, including Beijing, might run out of water.
Plans to pipe in Siberian water, which are likely to alarm conservationists, are not the first of their kind.
Last year, Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Tkachev suggested pumping water across Kazakhstan to Xinjiang, but only “under the condition of full compliance with the interests of Russia, including environmental.”
Citing scientists in Siberia, Russian state news agency TASS said “fresh water supplies in China could be a promising area of Russia exports.”
“Water is the same resource as oil, gas, gold, and sooner or later we will start to sell it,” Tomsk State University academic Stepan Svartsev was quoted as saying. “Our country has very large reserves and certain volumes could be sold.”
Nor would the pipeline represent China’s first foray into the world of mega-hydro projects.
In 2014, it inaugurated one of the biggest engineering feats in history, the South-North Water Transfer Project, a huge web of canals and reservoirs built to shift trillions of liters of water from southern China to the water-deprived north.
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