Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  India’s dream of linking its river systems is already becoming a reality for its booming Asian neighbor, China. In 2001, China launched the first phase of an epic, national river plumbing scheme to try to cope with its own daunting water scarcity challenge. With one-fifth of mankind inhabiting its borders, China faces perhaps the world’s most titanic clash between rapid economic modernization and environmental sustainability. Among its many severe environmental degradations, China is running perilously short of available clean freshwater. By about 2030 its supply will run out in vital regions of the country, and its national shortfall will be equal to its total usage in 2008. Increasingly, top leaders are acknowledging that the water scarcity crisis is a primary threat to China’s breakneck drive for first world living standards and its capacity to maintain social and political order by fulfilling the elevated expectations of 1.3 billion Chinese.

  China’s freshwater scarcity is more distressed than its overall population–water resource ratio suggests because much of its water is not easily accessible where or when it is most needed. Overall, China ranks a lowly 122nd among nations in per capita water use; the average Chinaman makes do with only about one-third the world average. Yet this masks China’s hydrological mismatch between its wet south and its water-starved north, where Chinese citizens use a scant one-tenth of the world’s average and face a steadily worsening water famine. A half century of intensive industrialization and urbanization, moreover, is also depleting the quality of available supply throughout the country with extreme water pollution. While China’s economic consumption and waste levels are soaring toward first world levels, in short, its water ecosystem management and waste disposal infrastructure remain irredeemably third world.

  After decades of increased agricultural output from the horrific low point of the 1959–1961 famines under state farm ownership in which 35 to 50 million died, China’s grain production peaked out in the late 1990s and declined by 10 percent through 2005, forcing China to import large quantities of grain to rebuild its national reserve stocks. Without significantly more clean freshwater and improved land conditions, China is staring at the prospect of running critically short of grain and being compelled to use its growing wealth to outbid poorer, hungry nations for food exports grown in water surplus countries. Making matters worse is that Chinese water demand is soaring to feed the transition of newly prosperous Chinese from subsistence, low-water-consuming, vegetarian-based diets to high-water, meat-enriched ones. In the last quarter century, average individual meat consumption increased two and a half times—along with soaring water consumption to produce it. As Chinese prosperity continues to spread, so will the nation’s soaring demand for water.

  China’s stupendous South-to-North Water Diversion Project to convey rivers of water across the breadth of China’s vast landscape, is intended to alleviate northern China’s immediate crisis. In effect, it is a modern iteration, writ bolder, of the historic Grand Canal: Yet whereas the Grand Canal of China’s medieval golden age had bridged the nation’s south-north hydrological divide and sustained water-distressed Beijing and the north with shipments of surplus southern rice—virtual water—the twenty-first-century challenge of meeting the needs of dense urban populations, giant factories, and intensively irrigated agriculture demands the direct delivery of indispensable freshwater itself.

  Like the Grand Canal, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is a large expression of China’s traditional Confucian outlook to harness and conquer nature to serve the sovereign vision of the public good. No nation in the postwar era has been as relentless as China in launching immense waterworks projects. Indeed, Mao Zedong’s communist government and its market-reformist successors were uniformly super-Confucian in their determination to mold and transform nature with the powerful industrial technologies of the age. The extensive buildings they wrought were reminiscent of the stunning construction bursts of previous Chinese dynastic restorations. In only half a century, they erected 85,000 dams, one-fourth of them giants—over four dams every day—providing irrigation, flood control, hydroelectricity, and seasonal storage capacity across a country that had little. Rivers were pinched by long levees; projects on the Yellow River alone used enough concrete to build 13 Great Walls. Overall water use quintupled; urban water supplies multiplied a hundredfold. Irrigation intensified and spread to many poor, rain-fed regions for the first time. Industrial use likewise expanded at big water-using steel mills, petrochemical plants, smelters, paper factories, and coal mines, and for cooling fossil-fuel-powered electric plants that soon dotted its riversides and lakes. If the human costs seemed high—Chinese officials themselves estimated that 23 million people had been dislocated in the dam-building frenzy, while critics placed the true number at 40 to 60 million—it was culturally consistent with China’s forced-labor traditions and facilitated China’s remarkable social feat of more than doubling its population while unleashing, especially since its 1978 market-oriented reforms, one of world history’s most spectacular bursts of wealth creation and increased standards of living.

  Chairman Mao, emulating the role of China’s founder, Yu the Great, had instilled the spirit of China’s new water age when, upon climbing up a small earthen dam at the Yellow River during first full inspection of the country in 1952, he wondered suggestively how China could better harness the power of the great river for economic development. Within three years the Mother River that gave birth to Chinese civilization was being grandiosely replumbed according to a plan that featured a staircase of dams and 46 hydroelectric power plants. A 60-foot-tall statute of Yu stands approvingly near the giant dam at Sanmenxia in the heart of ancient China, on which is inscribed the old Chinese adage: “When the Yellow River is at peace, China is at peace.”

  Yet right from the start the silty, unpredictable Yellow River showed it was not going to easily submit its sobriquet “China’s Sorrow” to the commands of modern engineers and central planners. The signature project that was to glorify the Maoist “people’s victory” over the Yellow was the Sanmenxia Dam at Three Gate gorge, the last gorge in the plateau of soft, loess soil before the river enters the northern plain of China’s wheat and millet breadbasket. Yet as soon as its giant reservoir began filling in 1960, the tragic flaw in the dam’s design became evident. Thick silt filled it to the brim in only two years, flooding tributary rivers upstream and threatening a catastrophic cascade downstream if the rising waters toppled the dam. Fearing the obliteration of populous cities, and the young communist state’s legitimacy with it, Mao indicated his readiness to destroy the dam by aerial bombardment if no other way to solve the siltation problem was found. Perseverant reengineering and a decade of hard reconstruction ultimately saved the dam. But in the end it was only a shadow of its intended magnificence—a reservoir only 5 percent of its original planned size, with corresponding limitations on its capacity to provide electricity and irrigation.

  By that time, a new and even more alarming environmental side effect of China’s massive hydraulic engineering of the Yellow became visible. The great, fickle river known for its devastating floods and drastic changes of course began to dry up. The phenomenon was first observed in the summer of 1972, when startled staff at a water measuring station near the river’s mouth saw a dry, cracking riverbed that no longer carried any water to the Bo Hai gulf. The average length of the dry area grew steadily from about 80 miles in the 1970s to a peak of about 440 miles in 1995. In 1997 the river failed to reach the sea for seven and a half months, much of its last trickles disappearing into the river sand bed near the inland ancient capital of Kaifeng.

  The river’s failure to reach the important coastal farming province of Shandong during the growing season caused much of the region’s wheat crop to shrivel and die. The alarmed Beijing government decided that, henceforth, diversions from the river would be rationed so that some water always flowed to the sea. Like America’s Colorado and the Egyptian Nile, the Yellow had become a totally managed river, with electronic m
aps, real time hydrological readings, and political measurement of every withdrawal. From 1999, the Yellow River never ran dry. But its fundamental problem has not been solved: There is simply not enough water to serve all the competing interests—farms, factories, cities, and natural ecosystems—that depend upon it. The river has effectively tapped out. In 2000, a mini water war erupted in Shandong when thousands of farmers, irate over their inadequate allocation of Yellow River water, illegally tapped reservoir water earmarked for cities. One policeman died and hundreds of farmers were injured when the authorities moved in to cut off the illicit siphoning.

  To compensate for the growing scarcity of Yellow River water, northern Chinese intensified extraction of the only readily available alternative—the large aquifers lying under the north China plain. One aquifer is near the surface and replenishes with rainfall and seasonal runoff; the other lies in a vault of rock and sediment deep beneath it, and is comprised of nonrenewable, ancient fossil water like that in the Sahara and Ogallala aquifers. As Yellow River basin water resources dwindled from overuse, thirsty Chinese on the northern plain began punching through the shallow aquifer and drilling increasingly deeper into the fossil aquifer for water. Extending from the mountains around Beijing in the north, to the Yellow’s central loess plateaus, the flat north China plain produces half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn and is as vital to the nation’s food security as Iowa and Kansas farming is to the United States. Although the plain has little reliable rainfall, and is prone to harsh extremes of heat, cold, drought and winds, its fertile soil yields abundant crops when irrigated. Once rich in surface streams, swamps and springs, with fast replenishing, subsurface water deposits often found only eight feet underground, the north China plain ecosystem is drying out rapidly both from secular climate change and overuse by man. As in India, groundwater overpumping is causing the water tables across the plain to plunge. It is not uncommon for well pumps to have to go 200 feet to strike freshwater. Because contamination from urban, industrial, coal-mining, and farm waste has polluted three-quarters of the region’s aquifers, metropolitan areas often have to drill three times deeper than that to obtain enough clean drinking water.

  Around water-short Beijing, some wells reach half a mile deep into the fossil aquifer. The city’s famous reservoir was declared unfit for drinking in 1997, while a large freshwater lake in the plains to the south shrank by two-fifths between the 1950s and 2000. Beijing is running so alarmingly short of water—the septupling of its population to 14 million in the postwar era has simply outstripped the capacity of its assiduously expanded water supply system—that officials have jocularly suggested the capital will eventually have to move to southern China where water is more plentiful.

  In total, roughly half the accessible, nonrenewable water was pumped out of the north’s huge aquifer in the second half of the twentieth century. Unless new supplies are found, or radical adjustments made, the bottom will be hit around 2035; some localities could run dry fifteen years before that. With four-fifths of China’s wheat crop dependent on irrigation water, the nation’s food bubble, and parallel bubbles in urban and industrial expansions that are being unsustainably inflated by overpumping, are in peril of popping.

  China’s impending water crisis could strike even sooner because north China’s microenvironment is becoming gravely parched from other unintended side effects of Yellow River basin engineering. The loss of naturally restorative streamflow due to damming and irrigation diversions, extensive wetlands drainage, deforestation, and grasslands clearance for farming, proliferation of open pit coal mining from the 1990s, and the ravenous groundwater pumping, has combined to create one of the world’s most acute crises of soil erosion—itself one of the greatest, though little publicized, water-related environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

  Half the lakes and a third of the grasslands surrounding the Yellow River’s source in the Tibetan plateau have vanished. In the severely deforested middle reaches of the Yellow River, some 70 percent of fertile loess plateau soil has eroded away. Desertification is invading north China. Besieging desert sands have replaced the ancient barbarian hordes as the chief menace at the perimeter of China’s Great Wall. In a single decade from the mid-1990s some 15 percent of all the region’s potential new cropland was destroyed. Mongolian Genghis Khan’s memorial tomb, originally emplaced in a beautiful plateau landscape of lake-filled grasslands, now stands nakedly alone amid barren sands. Great dust storms, like those that ravaged America’s High Plains in the 1930s, increasingly now choke the skies of Beijing and kill scores of Chinese—China’s leaders have been replanting a “green wall” of trees to try to shield the capital. The precious topsoil that China needs to grow the food crops for its next generation is being swept away in whirlwinds and sprinkled eastward over Korea, Japan, and even across the Pacific Ocean on to western Canada. Often the dust mixes with thick clouds of sooty, polluted air that drifts hundreds of miles to drop black blotches on car windshields in Beijing when it rains. The desiccation of northern China, in turn, intensifies regional droughts. The net effect is a significant reduction in total moisture throughout the Yellow River basin and the peaking out of the grain harvest from the late 1990s.

  In their massive reengineering of the Yellow River, postwar China’s master architects had not fully accounted for their own industrial age power to disturb the complex dynamics and restorative health needs of a total ecosystem. One of the more bizarre mutations of nature they created was that China’s Mother River today flows through north China within hundreds of miles of flood dikes and embankments at an altitude of several yards above the surrounding landscape, like some kind of Roman aqueduct or elevated train trestle. Thanks to the ongoing accumulation of silt trapped within its dikes, the bed of the suspended river is rising by about three feet every decade and dikes have to be built higher and higher to keep it in its bed. A vigorous debate rages whether Chinese engineers have struck a Faustian bargain with nature to avert smaller, regular floods today in exchange for a potentially catastrophic, dike-smashing, super cascade caused by a sudden water-and-silt surge in the future.

  China’s second great river basin is the Yangtze in the rainy south, where the historical problem wasn’t scarcity but water excess. It too has been massively reengineered by government central planners—and likewise is suffering serious degradations from the abuse of its ecosystem. As he had with the Yellow, Mao personally spurred the engineering boom when he inspected the river in 1953 and scolded water managers for the timidity of their plans to control the river’s infamous floods. The building ultimately produced storage reservoirs with 13 times more capacity than on the Yellow and the world’s largest—and most controversial—giant dam at Three Gorges. Building a dam at Three Gorges that could put an end once and for all to the terrible Yangtze floods had been a dream early in the century of China’s modern founder, Sun Yat-sen. In his nationally celebrated 1956 poem “Swimming,” Mao famously extolled his own vision for a dam that would “hold back Wushan Mountain’s clouds and rain, till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.” Despite Mao’s support, the Three Gorges Dam was much delayed, and in 1984 the project appeared to be shelved forever when a government review recommended against it. And but for China’s massacre of prodemocracy Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, it might have stayed there.

  China’s stunning transformation into the world’s fastest-growing large power had been launched with the successful 1978 reforms of post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping to enhance administrative efficiency and accelerate economic growth through controlled injection of market forces and some decentralization of political decision making. Many Westerners had hoped that Deng’s liberalizing reforms would lead China toward a liberal, Western-style democracy—despite Deng’s own disavowal of any such intentions. These hopes were violently crushed at Tiananmen Square. China’s hard-line leaders took umbrage at the world’s smoldering condemnations. To show their nationalistic defiance and u
nyielding commitment to China’s authoritarian, state-managed market system, they soon resuscitated the Three Gorges project—and imprisoned the dam’s domestic critics. Three Gorges was to stand not simply as a dam, but as a crowning showcase of the prowess, wealth, rising world-class status, and unalterable independence of the new China. They hailed it as their civilization’s greatest engineering project since the Great Wall.