Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

With 140 million people having to do just that, government mandarins also appear to feel a sense of crisis. Many of their hugely expensive and socially convulsive countermeasures smack of desperation. The relocation programs have spread ever wider, and their hydroengineering projects get bigger and bigger. The South-North Water Diversion Project, detailed in chapter 3, is the biggest gamble yet. Although the massive plan would transform the hydrology of China and possibly much of Asia, engineers felt they had no choice but to press ahead. Northern China could no longer pump water vertically from a few hundred meters underground, so it had started channeling it horizontally hundreds of kilometers from the south. The diversion project was a reinforcement operation.

“This is the only way to solve the water shortage problem,” Sun Feng, director of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, once told me. “The western leg is the only one that transfers water directly into the Yellow River so the whole basin will benefit.”

The big outstanding problem is one of quantity rather than quality. The Yellow’s volume is falling as demand rises. The river accounts for just 2 percent of the runoff in China, yet irrigates 15 percent of the country’s crops and supplies water to 12 percent of the population.

At the Yellow River control center in Zhengzhou, the allocation of water among the nine provinces it passes through is marked on another wall-sized screen. The proportion has been fixed since 1987 based on a long-term estimate of 58 billion cubic meters of runoff every year. That has proved a massive overestimate. This year, the runoff is forecast to be less than 50 billion cubic meters. In 2003, it fell below 45 billion. The provinces are supposed to share the impact of the shortfall equally. Yet Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Shandong take more than a billion cubic meters of water above their allocation every year without permission.

The loser is the ecosystem. Twenty-one billion cubic meters of water each year are set aside for sediment flushing and maintenance of nonhuman life on the river. This is the area of the water budget that is cut whenever provinces go over their limit. The Yellow River Conservancy Commission has recently conducted research that shows the value of keeping water for wildlife and nature, but they need more power to put this into action.

“Some provinces and reservoirs don’t obey our instructions. They ignore us to generate electricity,” says Yu Xiubo. “It’s a problem. We lack punitive measures.”

Dispersal of authority across agencies and provinces has not helped. To tighten administration, the central government is drafting a Yellow River Law that would give more power to the river’s administrating body. There are also plans for a Digital Yellow River that would allow bureaucrats based in Zhengzhou to remotely control and monitor sluice gates and irrigation channels along the entire length of the river. Currently this is possible only in the lower reaches.

This demand-side solution faces fierce opposition. No province wants to accept a cut in water supplies at a time when they all want to boost industry and agriculture. The latter is by far the biggest drain on the river, accounting for 90 percent of the diverted water, some of which is taken hundreds of kilometers into the desert. Yu and his colleagues are dispatched to sluice gates during times of drought when the Yellow River Conservancy Commission has to impose a potentially life-determining judgment on water supplies.

“It can be very dangerous,” says Yu. “In the past, our engineers have been thrown into the river by angry residents. In the early days after 1999, nobody wanted to accept us. Upstream residents didn’t care about low-stream demands. They said that, historically, they could always take what they wanted.”

Better regulation of demand is the best option, but upstream provincial governors are reluctant to accept tough controls on a resource that they have always taken for granted. A politically easier solution is to increase supply even if it means huge expense, waste, and environmental stress.

The world’s largest military has been mobilized too. In the battle against the elements, the People’s Liberation Army is in the front line. Troops are often dispatched after natural disasters. The People’s Armed Police are responsible for forest firefighting in the southern provinces. Ahead of the Olympics, thousands of troops were sent to dig an artificial training lake for a rowing team in Shaanxi. 21The navy was deployed to clear up algae that threatened the Olympic sailing events. The air force has variously been used to break up ice dams and spread tree seeds in aerial afforestation missions. But perhaps most striking are its attacks on the clouds. No country in the world pummels the sky with the verve of China. In 2006, there were 590 weather-modifying sorties nationwide. Gansu, one of the driest, poorest regions, had fewer clouds to aim at than most, but its pilots logged sixty-one hours of flight time chasing cumulus.

The gates were locked when I arrived at the Gansu aircraft rain enhancement base. It was winter. The cloudbusting season was over, but one of the caretakers, Ma Dubin, offered to show me around. He was a local man and something of an authority on the strange science of weather modification.

Cloud-seeding experiments began in the United States in 1946, when General Electric (the company that also gave the world hydrofluorocarbons and leaded gas) launched the first experiments. Western scientists soon became skeptical about the results, but the Soviet Union enthusiastically adopted and improved upon the technology. China has now taken it on with a degree of alacrity seen nowhere else on earth.

Inevitably, the start of operations was in 1958—the Great Leap Forward year when, as we have seen in several chapters, China tried to conquer nature with a burst of dam building, sparrow killing, tree felling, and desert greening. Mao Zedong gave the project his stamp of approval: “Man-made rain is very important. I hope the meteorological experts do their utmost to make it work.” 22

The first cloud-seeding flights were in Gansu and Jilin, where the air force was dispatched to take on the clouds. In the earliest attempts, cannons fired catalytic chemicals into the heavens. Chinese scientists were pleased with the results, estimating the increase in rainfall at 10 to 25 percent. This prompted the government to enact a law encouraging local governments to “enhance leadership over weather modification.” Nationwide, there are now more than thirty provincial-level offices dealing with rain creation, employing over 50,000 people with a budget in excess of $100 million per year. 23No other country in the world comes close in matching the scale of this unapologetically man-made climate change. 24

In Gansu, the rainmaking season ran from March 1 to the end of October. During that period, a small squadron of ten pilots moved into the dormitory to be on permanent standby to shoot down approaching clouds. There were three main buildings at the center. The first was the command center, where meteorologists analyzed data from local weather stations. Next to this were accommodations for the pilots, who had a weight machine, table tennis, and a billiard table to while away the hours between missions. There was plenty of free time. On average, they were scrambled only four or five times a month during the summer.

The third building was the storeroom for the chemicals and munitions used to bust the clouds. Outside it was a stack of empty pellet crates from a former weapons plant, Factory No. 556 in Wuhai, that had been converted to manufacture weather-modification devices. On the floor nearby were half a dozen rusting 37-millimeter shells that had been customized to deliver chemical catalysts into the sky. Whether fired from antiaircraft guns below or dropped by planes from above, the aim was essentially the same: to load the clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen that would thicken the water droplets to the point where they became heavy enough or cool enough to fall as snow or rain.