China faces major water crisis

By Richard Spencer

July 2, 2005
A fisherman works his net in the brown waters of the Yangtze.

Photo: AFP

Cannon and rocket-launchers still protect Beijing from their vantage point in the Fragrant Hills, just as the Great Wall nearby has done for centuries.

But these cannon are pointing up into the clouds and their foe is thirst.

The Fragrant Hills gun emplacement is part of an ever-more desperate quest to counter its chronic water shortage. Whenever the sky clouds over, the guns fire shells containing silver iodide that is supposed to precipitate rainfall.

China has the largest rain-seeding program in the world, with two military aircraft, 30 cannon and 20 rocket-launchers dedicated to the task around Beijing alone.

Those efforts are dwarfed by others in the arid north-western regions, but most provinces have some capability to seed for rain.

Zhang Qiang, the deputy head of the Beijing artificial climate office, admits it is "hard to quantify how much rain falls because of the seeding, and how much is natural".

China's destruction of its environment, and, in particular, its water, is so devastating that the country has no option but to continue such outlandish experiments.

Others include building huge dams such as the Three Gorges, in many cases preventing water from reaching countries downstream. It is also building an $A85 billion diversion scheme to funnel water north from the Yangtze.

Parliament's Vice-Chairman Sheng Huaren has admitted that 300 million people lack a safe water supply. He said 90 per cent of the river water that flowed through China's cities was heavily polluted.

Earlier, Qiu Baoxing, the Vice-Construction Minister, said that total water resources per person would decline by almost a fifth by 2030.

He also acknowledged that China was staggeringly wasteful. For every unit of gross domestic product, it uses five times as much water as the world average. State-owned companies are largely to blame.

Another explanation can be seen at China's most expensive golf club, Pine Valley, designed by Jack Nicklaus with a clubhouse set in an artificial landscape of ponds and waterfalls.

In its desire to be seen as a progressive country, China is creating a middle class. So the inhabitants of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai receive preferential treatment in education, health and water.

The contrast with the polluted water available to the poor is increasingly causing unrest.

Two villages in Zhejiang province are in the hands of rioting residents, who have driven out police and closed down factories they blame for poisoning the water supply.

- Telegraph
