China's Unquenchable Thirst

In June 8, 1988, I boarded a midnight train bound for Zhengzhou from Beijing, where my trip to research China's land and water challenges had begun just three days before. My senses were already brimming with the sights and sounds of the capital city and its surroundings -- horse-drawn carts piled high with bricks, waves of wheat awaiting harvest, bustling markets along dirt roads, and bicycles, bicycles everywhere.

Under China's "responsibility system," farmers were now allowed to sell whatever they harvested above their quota to the state. Colorful roadside stands laden with melons, fruits, vegetables, and meats were sprouting like weeds after a long winter. Many farmers suddenly had money to build new houses, and signs of a construction mini-boom were unmistakable.

This, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg: soon enough China's cities would catch the market-economy wave and ride it head-long into the globalized world of the 21st century. It was clear even then, nearly 20 years ago, that the availability of freshwater posed a major challenge to China's future. China was home to 21 percent of the world's people but only 8 percent of its renewable water supply. Most of that water was in the south, making the north even more water-short than the national figures suggested.

Water tables were already dropping as much as a meter a year in parts of the North China Plain, a major grain-producing region. The over-pumping of groundwater in Beijing's eastern suburbs was causing the land itself to subside as much as 10 centimeters annually. So as the train left the Beijing station and rolled past the Great Hall of the People, brightly lit in the dark of night, I was already wondering what China's water officials would do.

Two days before, I'd met Dr. Li Xuinfa, director of the Institute for Research on Environmental Protection, who stunned me by presenting me with a Chinese version of my 1984 Worldwatch paper, Water: Rethinking Management in an Age of Scarcity. The 60-page paper,which Dr. Li had translated and was planning to have published in China, called for a fundamental shift away from big, ecologically destructive water supply projects and toward conservation and efficiency improvements -- not a popular idea back then. But I wondered how much traction it would get in China.

I fell asleep quickly, lulled by the sound and motion of the train. I intended to awaken early so as not to miss a main attraction (at least for me), the crossing of the Yellow River. And it was that sight -- of China's second largest river, the cradle of its civilization -- that has most stuck with me for the last 20 years. I was amazed at how little water was in the channel. Such a paltry flow couldn't possibly sustain a major expansion of irrigated agriculture, industrial production, and urbanization, much less the fisheries and diversity of freshwater species that depended on those flows.

Some numbers confirm the impression. Chinese scientists first recorded zero flow in the lower reaches of the Yellow River in 1972, and between then and 1999, the river ran dry for a portion of all but six years. By the mid-1990s, about seven years after I returned from my trip and wrote in World Watch about how north China was exceeding its water budget, the average length of dry riverbed had expanded to 700 kilometers, up from 130 kilometers in the 1970s. In 1997, the lower reaches of the Yellow went dry for a record 226 days, causing US $1.6 billion in economic damage to Shandong Province, last in line for the river's water.

The disappearance of wetlands, harm to aquatic life, and other downstream ecological effects have led the Yellow River Conservancy Commission to restore some minimum flows to the river in recent years. But the overall health of the Yellow remains in serious decline.