This is China! BLOG

Inexorable China: Increasing Water Demands

“In the 1950s through the 1970s we only had one dust storm about every three years,” a retired professor at Beijing’s Foreign Language Institute told me in the Spring of 2006. I had just missed a dust storm – sha chen bao – that had buried Beijing under a quarter-inch of dust. Many of the cars that congest Beijing streets still had the coarse red dirt smudging their hoods and roofs. The stuff seemed impossible to remove completely. Two years earlier, in the Winter of 2004, I had been to the capitol of Liaoning Province, Shenyang, and had had to push my way through frigid artic winds and a dust storm. I found myself captivated – once snugly esconced in the back seat of a sedan – by the many women that road their bicycles through the swirling Martian sand. They wore thin jackets, silken gloves and wrapped their heads and necks fully round with a long see-through scarf. The Beijing professor continued, “in the 1990s we started seeing one dust storm a year in the city. Now, we have at least three a year.”

The huge growth of the economy of China in general, and of Beijing specifically, has led to draught-like conditions in the Northwest of China. The provinces of Gansu, Ningxia, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei in particular have bee in particular have been hard hit by consumption levels of water unprecedented in Chinese history. Typically in fear of floods by raging rivers and overflowing lakes, Chinese in the North are now having to deal with the reality that entires bodies of water have dried up in inland China. Livelihoods based in farming and fishing in and around the northern lakes and rivers have become a thing of the past as the Chinese cities have grown in response to the influx of peasants from the outlying regions. As cities such as Beijing, Xi’an and Tianjin have grown, demands on water for industrial and residential use have skyrocketed in the past decade. The country’s Academy of Engineering predicts that, by 2030, the amount of water available per person will have declined from the current 2,200 cubic metres (580,000 American gallons) a year to 1,760 cubic metres. By that time, the academy says, China’s population will be about 1.6 billion, and its water needs will be close to the limits of what is available, according to The Economist Magazine.

Further, air pollution caused by the exhaust of hundreds of thousands of cars in the daily commute in northern cities have created localized green house effects that have hastened the erosion of the Gobi desert, which is advancing 2,460 kilometers per year, according to The Independent, a British newspaper. Deforestation of regions that once bounded the desert regions of the North have also contributed greatly to an erosion that annually is visibly advancing toward Beijing.

The Beijing Central Government is aware of China’s inextricable trend toward desertification, which has pushed the price of water up for individuals and companies alike. The Beijing government has set about concerted policy changes to modify the behaviour of residents that once took water for granted. Now, TV commercials abound about the importance of conserving water at home. Subway trains and street signs admonish those who would waste water. Hotels have signs over bathroom sinks and in showers about saving water. Inns encourage guests to continue using the same towels and linen through their short stays.

Meanwhile, the Central government has launched even more ambitious programs dedicated to staving off if not reversing the draught conditions. 2003 China consumed four times as much water for each 10,000 yuan ($1,200) of GDP compared with the world average, the Ministry of Water Resources said this month. The most high-profile is a pipeline the government is constructing to divert water from the Yangtze Rivers and tributaries in the south to the cities in the North. The project is reminiscent of the diversion projects in the Southwest United States that involved the piping of water from the Colorado river in the 1950s to cities Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and to California farmlands managed by corporations. Already, many are decrying the environmental impact the construction of the pipeline is wreaking on the supporting environment. And very much like the construction of the Hoover Damn in Arizona during the urban renewal – just after World War II – the Chinese have been damning up the Yangzi River in the largest hydroelectric construction project in the world, the Three Gorges project.

In China, water may one day be traded as precious a commodity as gold itself.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China

Other articles in the “Inexorable China” Series:
1. Inexorable China
2. Inexorable China: Land Grabs