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PART 1
The
death of China's rivers
By Jasper Becker
 China at the dawn of
history was much warmer and wetter than it is today,
with elephants, rhinoceroses and crocodiles living north
of the Yangtze River. Five or six thousand years of
cutting forests and draining marshes have changed the
climate to the point where the landscape has been
devastated. China has the highest ratio of actual to
potential desertified land in the world, according to
the World Bank.
The accelerating speed of that
environmental change is most evident in the Yellow
River, the heart of Han Chinese civilization. The river
has virtually disappeared. Now, in what may be the
biggest water-diversion plan in history, China will
build a canal north from the Three Gorges Dam that
ultimately will tunnel under the Yellow River to bring
water to dry northern areas of China. The US$50 billion
south-to-north water diversion scheme will require the
resettlement of up to 400,000 peasants along the three
possible routes. Already 1.8 million have been resettled
along the banks of the Yangtze itself.
China
today is finding itself in the middle of schizophrenic
attempts to do two opposing things at once. On the one
hand, it is in the middle of by far the biggest
water-diversion plan in history, of which the massive
Three Gorges project, which will impound 600 kilometers
of water reaching nearly from Wuhan to Chongqing, is
only a part. At the same time, officials appear to have
finally become aware of the environmental depredation
China faces, and the damage that dams cause, and are
frantically stopping farming and resettling villagers to
plant forest in an effort to halt desertification and
flood damage on denuded hills.
The need for the
massive projects is the result of centuries of
environmental misuse that accelerated when the
communists took power. Soil erosion as a result of rapid
deforestation on the Loess Plateau started in the 7th
century BC. This led to dangerous floods and in turn to
a dike-building program that continues to this day. The
very name Yellow River (Chinese Huang He) comes from the
silt, which, like most of China's rivers, has now raised
its bed to dangerous levels far above the surrounding
plain.
The first big dam-construction projects
of the communist era, such as the Sanmen Xia Dam,
concentrated partly on the Yellow River, where a cascade
of 46 dams was started. Yet the more engineering took
place, the worse the river became. It now exists only in
name, except for a couple of months during the rainy
season, causing a prolonged and permanent shortage
crippling industry and agriculture. It usually runs dry
about 1,000km from the sea. What happened to the Yellow
River was then repeated in the Huai river basin, home to
150 million people. After disastrous floods in 1950, Mao
Zedong ordered "the mountains to bend their tops, and
the rivers to give way". Like latter-day pharaohs, the
party mobilized enormous resources and manpower into
building 36 big dams, 159 smaller dams and 4,000 locks
and barrages.
"Man must conquer nature,"
declared the Party, but the result was that a
once-fertile plain was wrecked by droughts alternating
with violent flash flooding. The most extended period of
drought was as long as 247 days in 1999, forcing cities
and towns to build more reservoirs or to rely on wells
chasing shrinking underground aquifers deeper and deeper
underground.
Although such massive engineering
achievements have been trumpeted as among the greatest
symbols of communist state power, 3,000 of these dams
collapsed, including many along the Huai River. In
August 1975, the Shimantan and Banqiao dams gave way,
killing 240,000 by some accounts.
The result is
that two-thirds of China's cities are now short of water
and the very existence of some, such as Taiyuan, the
capital of Shanxi, is threatened. It is the same story
in Manchuria, which was densely settled only in the last
century. Another example is Tianjin, the port and
industrial city that sits astride the Hai River on the
North China Plain. The river has long since ceased to
exist in all but name because so much has been diverted.
A few years ago, the water running through the center of
the city actually had been diverted from the Yellow
River, which could ill afford to lose what it had.
After building 30 dams and reservoirs to supply
itself with water, China's third-biggest municipality
was forced in the late 1970s to divert the waters of the
Luan River, 160km to the north. Twenty years later in
1999, a fresh crisis forced the city to divert all its
water from the Yellow river, 645km to the south.
All but a handful of the 300 tributaries that
feed into the Hai River are now dry, with dire
consequences for a population of 120 million people in
the Hai river basin. But agricultural runoff from
chemical fertilizers, industrial effluent and urban
waste have rendered the water in most of its reservoirs
undrinkable. In desperation, Tianjin ordered hundreds of
officials to patrol the river banks to prevent theft of
the precious water.
The city has shut down
public baths, saunas and other entertainment centers and
rationed water to just eight cubic meters a month per
person. More than half of the 9 million people in the
Tianjin municipality are peasants who lack sufficient
water to plant crops, raise fish or breed livestock.
Across the whole of the North China Plain, where
half of China's wheat is grown, 3.6 million wells have
been sunk, mostly for irrigation. The aquifer below is
being steadily drained and the water table is 90 meters
below the surface and dropping by three to six meters a
year. Some 60 percent of the land in Tianjin
municipality is plagued by subsidence. If there is no
solution to the water shortage in northern China, at
least 20 million peasants will be forced to stop
farming.
Water quality is also a big problem.
Most of the 20 billion tonnes of urban sewage that
China's expanding cities produce each year is dumped
straight into rivers and lakes. China now holds the
unenviable record of producing as much organic water
pollution as the United States, Japan and India
combined. Experts calculate that 700 million Chinese
consume drinking water contaminated with levels of
animal and human waste that do not meet minimum state
drinking-water standards. No one is sure what this
means. Any research into the subject has been
discouraged by the government but China's high rates of
hepatitis A, diarrhea, and liver, stomach and esophageal
cancer may be linked to the pollution.
Unable to
use the water in the reservoirs or rivers, most
industrial cities have been forced to use untreated
industrial wastewater to irrigate crops, especially
vegetables, grown in the suburbs.
In the city of
Kunming, the capital of subtropical Yunnan province,
there is no talk of drought, since the city is right
next to one of Asia's biggest freshwater lakes. But
until the first wastewater plant was built in 1990, 90
percent of Kunming's wastewater was pumped untreated
into the lake. The lake water is now undrinkable despite
several billion dollars having been spent trying to
clean it up. Since the 1980s, the city has relied on
water channeled from the Songhua Dam reservoir in the
mountains some 80km away. Now, as the city of 1.4
million prepares to expand, it must invest in an even
bigger engineering project to divert water from other
rivers such as the Golden Sands, 190km to the north.
Most of China's lakes, reservoirs, canals and
rivers are covered in a thick film of algae or clogged
by water hyacinth. Even the mighty Yangtze's waters are
undrinkable. None of the cities along its banks can use
its waters but have to tap reservoirs far away or drill
deep for water. Shanghai has drilled for so much water
that land in the center of the city has sunk 1.7m in the
past 40 years.
Some predict that within 20 years
even the Yangtze will resemble the Yellow River. When
you fly over the middle or lower Yangtze Valley, the sun
sometimes reflects the water trapped in the thousands of
ponds, lakes and paddy fields, giving a hint of how this
was all once an immense swamp. Millennia of drainage
work have reduced it to a network of interconnected
lakes and waterways protected by dikes. Since 1949,
two-thirds of the Yangtze Valley lakes have disappeared
as more and more land has been reclaimed. The total
surface area of lakes in the middle and lower Yangtze
Valley has shrunk from 18,000 square kilometers to 7,000
in just 50 years.
So much topsoil is swept
downstream - 700 million tonnes during the 1998 summer
floods - that both reservoirs and lakes are silting up
so quickly their capacity to contain the floodwaters is
declining rapidly. The storage volume of these lakes has
fallen by 8 billion cubic meters. Dongting Lake, the
second-largest in China, has decreased by about 50
square kilometers to almost half what it was before
1949. And it has silted up too, becoming more and more
shallow. The lake bed has been rising by 3.7 centimeters
a year and about 100 million cubic meters of silt has
been deposited.
The sheer pointlessness of the
vast investment in dam building was brought home by the
1998 floods, which killed 4,000 people and cost the
economy $36 billion. The dams have done nothing to stop
the floods, which have been increasing in frequency and
severity. Even the Three Gorges Dam, big though it is,
will make no practical difference.
Next: The peasants
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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