Drought hit China to reroute Yangtze

The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilisation, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities - 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone - has drained underground aquifers that took millennia to fill.

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution - divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China's most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. Its 38 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had "urgent problems," the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts. The project's human cost is staggering. Along the middle route, which starts in Hubei province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland. "Look at this dead yellow earth," said Li Jiaying, 67, "Our old home wasn't even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No-one wanted to leave."

About 150,000 people had been resettled by this spring. Many more will follow. A recent front-page article in People's Daily, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, said the project "has entered a key period of construction".

Some Chinese scientists say the diversion could destroy the ecology of the southern rivers, making them as useless as the Yellow River. The government has neglected to do proper impact studies, they say. More than 14 million people in Hubei would be affected if the project damaged the Han River, the tributary of the Yangtze where the middle route starts, said Du Yun, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the provincial capital.

Officials in provinces south of Beijing and Tianjin have privately raised objections and are haggling over water pricing and compensation.Officials in water-scarce Hebei province are frustrated that four reservoirs in their region have sent more than 205 billion gallons, of water to Beijing since September 2008 in an "emergency" supplement to the middle route.

Overseers of the eastern route, which is being built alongside an ancient waterway for barges called the Grand Canal, have found that the drinking water to be brought to Tianjin from the Yangtze is so polluted that 426 sewage treatment plants have to be built. The source water from the Han River on the middle route is cleaner but the main channel will cross 205 rivers and streams in the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing.

"Environmental advocate Dai Qing said: "I think this project is a product of the totalitarian regime in Beijing as it seeks to take away the resources of others. I am totally opposed." Dai believes the government should instead be limiting the population in the northern cities and encouraging water conservation.

Wang Jian, a former environmental and water management official with the Beijing government and the State Council, China's cabinet, said the project "carries huge risks," but there were no other options given the severity of the water shortage.

The demands of the north will not abate. Migration from rural areas means Beijing's population is growing by one million every two years, Hou Dongmin, a scholar of population development at Renmin University of China, said: "With its dwindling water resources, Beijing cannot sustain a larger population. Instead, it should make serious efforts to control the population, if not reduce it."

However, the planning for Beijing's growth up to 2020 by the State Council already assumes the water diversion will work. Wang said: "Instead of transferring water to meet the growing demand of a city, we should decide the size of a city according to how much water resources it has."