This is China! BLOG

The Politics of Water

A Danish friend once told me he would never buy real estate in Beijing because it will all be under sand in twenty years anyway. Though tongue-in-cheek, he might just have a thought there. During a recent trip to Beijing I talked with a Chinese professional who told me there were rumors in Chinese chat rooms that the capital of China just might move - southward. He explained to me that the strains the city and its population are putting on the environment are unsustainable: water, especially, is a scarce and precious resource the city has been siphoning from other locations (sometimes illegally), including those in other provinces, like Hebei.

“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 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.”

Though this year was light in comparison to previous years in the number and severity of dust storms that come visiting the capital, everyone is aware of the inevitable: the Gobi Desert is coming. And let’s not forget the Mongolian Steppes, where thousands of sheep have eaten away the nappy grass that has held the loose soil in place for millenia. The Central Government began a program of planting trees in advance of the encroaching desert sands, and claims to have seen some success in the reduction of the rate at which the desert is expanding, as well for this year at least in the condition of the dust storms.

However, the city is still thirsty. That the Beijing government had to put out a notification that it did indeed have enough water to support the athletes, visitors and residents in the city during the Olympics more throws a spotlight on the issue than alleviates anxiety about lack of the resource. Beijing has grown quickly, and in anticipation of the Olympics has built a city that is more an icon for flagrant consumption than a vanguard for the sort of balanced growth the Central Committee has professed it is pursuing.

“So where will they move the Capital?” I asked the professional.

“On the internet people have been gossiping about the government moving to Hubei Province, to somewhere near Wuhan. Lots of rivers down there, and not much development.”

Does politics float?