Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

The scheme has been dogged by delays and cost overruns that set it back at least four years. What should have been the easiest section, the east leg, was supposed to have been on tap in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics. Planners originally hoped to use the 1,400-year-old Grand Canal that already ran from south to north, but its waters were too contaminated by toxins, urban waste, and chemical fertilizer. The designers earmarked more than half the budget for that section on water treatment. But the filthy green slime proved almost untreatable. In 2007, 300 hectares of wheat died in the fields after local farmers used the canal for irrigation. 31More than a year after the Olympics, Beijing had yet to receive a drop of water from the east route and it was unsure when it ever would.

Instead, the government rushed ahead on the central route from the Han, another tributary of the Yangtze. Engineers from the 16th Bureau of the China Railway Construction Group were dispatched to start on the most complex section, a 4.1-kilometer tunnel under the Yellow River. From there, a long expanse of farmland was cleared for the channel that is one day expected to carry 9.5 billion cubic meters of water every year to slake the thirst of Beijing and nineteen other cities in the north. But this leg too has proved far more expensive than expected. As well as enormous pipes and aqueducts, northern plumbing systems are having to be adapted for the high levels of acidity in the southern water.

The social impact is likely to be felt most by the 300,000 people who will be forced to resettle, most of whom live in an area that will be flooded when the Danjiangkou Dam is completed at the southernmost point of the route. Even those who will remain in their homes fear the easing of the north’s water shortage will worsen the south’s problems of pollution, sedimentation, and drought. 32

The challenges facing the western leg have proved more difficult still. Under the government’s blueprint, 17 billion cubic meters of water were supposed to be pumped from the Jinsha, the headwater of the Yangtze, at an altitude of 4,100 meters on the Tibetan Plateau, down to the Yellow River. Crossing these highlands will require pumping stations and tunnels. It will be hugely expensive and politically difficult. 33

Fears arose that it could prove a megaproject too far, even for China. The plans submitted by the Ministry of Water Resources were postponed indefinitely. Influential supporters of the scheme started to backtrack. 34Downstream provinces, including the major industrial centers of Nanjing, Wuhan, and Shanghai, worried that they would end up dry because the Yangtze was already showing the strains of overuse, overdamming, climate change, and pollution. In 2006, several dozen scientists in Sichuan published a collection of memorandums that called into question the feasibility and desirability of the western leg.

The debate suggested the Maoist approach to development—”think big, move fast and worry about the consequences later”—was belatedly being called into question. 35Even the most audacious Chinese engineering visionaries were discovering limits to what man could or should attempt in the campaign to conquer the natural world. The new big idea was “think small,” or so it seemed. For the environment, that was good news. But for at least one member of the old guard, it was lamentable.

Guo Kai was one of the last survivors of the Yugong Yishan, mountain-moving generation of Maoists. While the rest of humanity looked on in awe at the grand hydroengineering schemes of modern China, the retired general told me he was frustrated by the nation’s lack of ambition.

I met Guo in a tea shop. He looked very much the pensioner, dressed in thick layers of vests, shirts, and cardigans as he explained his world-transforming plan to me. Along with his chief collaborator, Li Ling, another retired officer from the second artillery division, we talked over glasses of green tea that were too hot to hold, much like their proposal has been since it was first mooted in 1976.

They wanted to redraw the hydrology of Asia. Pointing on a vividly colored map of Asia’s river systems to the four thickest blue veins coursing through Tibet, Guo said only one, the Yangtze, ran east to China. The others flowed south to form the Brahmaputra in India.

“The rivers cross the border. It is a waste. The water is needed here. Look how dry China is.” And with that his finger moved north to Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia, where the map was indeed marked with huge brown and yellow splodges of desert.

Fixing the problem, he said, was a simple matter of logic. India and Bangladesh get so much rainfall they often suffer from floods. If China, with a seventh of the precipitation, diverted a third of Tibet’s rivers for its own use, he argued, all three nations could benefit.

Not surprisingly, politicians in Delhi and Dhaka are unwilling to donate even a drop from the Brahmaputra, which they consider vital for irrigation and drinking supplies. Indian newspapers have expressed outrage at Guo’s idea. If Beijing was ever to formally adopt such a plan, there would be a high chance of a water war between Asia’s two most populous nations. 36

Fortunately, there is no sign of this happening any time soon. Despite the support of several old generals, Guo and Li have been politely shunted aside by the politburo. Fiercer critics dismiss them as eccentric has-beens.

Guo’s hydrological training was not just old-school, it was no school. He taught himself about river systems while locked in a cellar by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. A hydrological study of western China was one of the only books in his makeshift cell. Criticized by the young ideologues and filled with self-doubt, he devoted his detention first to the book and then to drawing up a plan to solve China’s water problems. It was to become a lifetime obsession.

But Guo’s reputation was not helped by his association with a still bolder plan to use nuclear weapons to blast a 2-kilometer-wide air tunnel through the Himalayas that would allow warm, moist currents from the subcontinent to circulate north. The general calculated that 200 warheads, each with the power of the Hiroshima bomb, would be needed to clear the necessary 3 billion cubic meters of rock.

The proposal to shift the planet’s most immovable object raised eyebrows even in mountain-moving China. Guo was ridiculed. One of his associates, Mu Qinzhong, ended up in prison. Guo distanced himself from that crazy scheme, but he has not completely given up on his revolutionary solution to China’s water shortage. 37Fortunately, more cautious heads have prevailed.

Guo’s failure was revealing and, from an environmental perspective, encouraging. Although the old Maoist beliefs live on in grand nature-conquering schemes, they are now contending with rival ways of thinking that show more respect for the environment.

A new generation of scientists, journalists, and environmentalists are questioning the fundamental tenets of nation-building with the tacit support of senior leaders. They are a source of hope that the Scientific Outlook on Development might one day pioneer a more sustainable path between Taoism and Maoism.

The new generation is far better educated than their predecessors, many of whom secured posts through political contacts during the Cultural Revolution (when most universities were closed). Rather than battle nature, this new wave sought to understand man’s place within it. Instead of expansionist megaprojects they focused on grassroots conservation work. Instead of using science to support political dogma, they saw it as a means to pursue truth and efficiency. Instead of secretive, top-down planning, they championed bottom-up accountability and transparency. And, most important, they had a different view of nature’s limits because they were confronted on a daily basis with the foul consequences of pollution, depleted resources, and hard-to-maintain megaprojects. Even some of the old-timers agreed it was time for a rethink. 38