FEATURE - China's sinking city highlights water crisis
Date: 19-Jan-01
Country: CHINA
Author: Jeremy Page
As the city's flourishing chemical industry sucks the water table dry, the ground slips another few centimetres (inches) every year, buckling roads, tilting and toppling old buildings, and prising lampost bases from pavements.
"When I was a kid, there was water everywhere," says Cao, 62, a retired engineer, standing on a bridge sagging dangerously over a parched river bed. "We never imagined it could run out."
"Now we know water is our most precious natural resource."
Cangzhou is one of the worst casualties of a man-made water crisis that has gripped northern China and now threatens to undermine the nation's economic development and social stability in the 21st century.
More than two decades of overpumping and unbridled industrial development have turned rivers and streams to dust, dried up wells and springs, and made entire lakes disappear.
Of China's 668 cities, 400 suffer water shortages. In the countryside, riots have broken out as farmers battle for water.
Without prompt action, China's total water demand will outstrip usable resources by 31.8 billion cubic metres (1.12 trillion cu ft) by 2010, according to official forecasts.
"The discrepancy between water supply and demand gets more prominent every day," said Zhang Zhongfa, senior research fellow at the cabinet's Development Research Centre.
"Water resources cannot satisfy the demands of the national economy and social development," said Zhang, an adviser to the government on the water crisis.
DESPERATE TIMES, BIG PROJECTS
For China's Communist leaders, desperate times call for massive infrastructure.
They have revived a monster plan first dreamed up by Chairman Mao Zedong 50 years ago to divert the waters of the Yangtze River in southern China hundreds of kilometres (miles) to the parched cities and farmland of the north.
The $17-billion project will pump the water via three channels through eastern, central and western China to replenish the Yellow River, the lifeblood of northern China which failed even to reach the sea almost every summer over the last decade.
Construction is due to start next year on the eastern route, which will piggyback on the Grand Canal, the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) waterway from the southeastern city of Hangzhou to Beijing.
"Only the south-to-north water transfer project can solve the water shortage problem of the north," Zhang said.
But already environmentalists are sounding alarm bells.
China says the project will only take five percent of the Yangtze's flow and will not upset its ecological balance, but some experts predict the Yangtze itself could run dry by 2030.
Dai Qing, an outspoken environmental activist, compares the plan to China's other vast water project - the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze - against which she has campaigned for more than a decade.
"I am strongly opposed to the water diversion plan," she said. "This is just another grand project to try and attract money and to prove China's status in the world."
"The bigger the project, the more money they get," she said. "They never think about the end result. It has been like that since the 1950s."
POLITICAL WATER PROBLEMS
Even if the project is finished on target in 2015, many doubt farmers will be able and willing to pay for the diverted water, which will be sold at a steep 1.6 yuan per cubic metre - about the same as in relatively affluent Beijing.
Raising water prices is essential to curb consumption, environmental experts say.
But in a country where average rural income is just over 2,000 yuan ($240) per year, any price increase is potentially explosive.
Civil unrest over water erupted several times last year, including a deadly riot by villagers in the eastern province of Shandong in July after officials cut off water supplies from a reservoir they had used to irrigate crops.
In August, six people were killed accidentally when officials in the southern province of Guangdong blew up a water cha