Murky Yangtze River Threatens Ambitious Water Transfer Project

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A multibillion-dollar channel to be completed this year aims to transfer water over hundreds of kilometers from China’s Yangtze River to the North China Plain, bringing Beijing an extra 1.2 billion cubic meters of water a year to address its worsening water scarcity. But the project’s hopes are dimmed by the worsening water quality in the Yangtze, China’s longest waterway. Pungent industrial effluents, noxious garbage, and tremendous soil losses are degrading one of the river’s most important tributaries, deepening concerns that, in the absence of further action, the costly diversion project may end up only saddling Beijing with dirty water, according to People’s Daily.

This 1,241-kilometer canal between the middle Yangtze and Beijing is only one of the three routes planned for China’s ambitious north-to-south water transfer project, begun in 2002. The project calls for the construction of three northward canals across the eastern, central, and western parts of China to link the country’s four major rivers: the Yangtze, Yellow, Huai River, and Hai. The proposal ranks in scale with several other mega-size projects designed by the Chinese government in recent years—including the world’s highest railway across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the world’s largest hydropower dam on the Three Gorges.

Decision-makers believe the massive project, which by mid-century is expected to supply nearly 50 billion cubic meters of water annually from the Yangtze basin to China’s parched north, will help reallocate the nation’s unevenly distributed water resources. The costly 500 billion yuan (US$62.5 billion) project is also touted as a solution to the severe water shortages affecting nearly 300 million people in China’s northern and northwestern regions.

Critics of the project, however, have raised concern about the high uncertainties and risks associated with the undertaking, including significant ecological and environmental impacts along the waterways, resettlement issues, and worsening water quality. While most of these adverse effects remain to be seen, the deadly pollution of the Yangtze River is already a major bottleneck to the project. With billions of tons of untreated industrial and municipal wastewater, as well as agricultural runoff containing pesticides, fertilizers, and manure, entering the waterway each year, the Yangtze now joins the notoriously polluted Huai River and the largely undrinkable Yellow River as a looming ecological disaster.

Wastewater treatment has been given top priority along the eastern route of the project, which will derive its water from the lower reaches of the Yangtze basin where the most-polluting factories are concentrated. The middle route of the project, which will supply water for Beijing, Tianjin Municipality, and other big cities, involves the construction of a vast reservoir to collect clean Yangtze water. Unlike these two routes stretching across China’s most densely regions, the western route will cut through the Qinghai Tibet Plateau at an elevation of 3000–5000 meters, linking the Yangtze with the headwaters of the Yellow River. Still under design, it is the most ambitious and controversial of the three routes.