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China Policy Institute Policy Paper 2015: No 6
China’s Water Problems
E. N. Anderson
Significance
Much of China is short of water, and development has stressed China’s water resource base to the limit.
Current measures to alleviate water shortage are aggressive and on a very large scale, but have
problems of their own. China now needs to transition from giant water projects such as big dams and
canals to more efficient, conservationist management. Plans for efficient allocation and pricing have
been advanced to solve a building crisis. It remains to be seen whether China’s top-down governance
system, and tradition of heavy construction, can be flexible enough to meet the challenges.
What We Need to Know: China’s Water Resource Base
China has faced local droughts and floods throughout history, and was a leader in river management
and irrigated agriculture from early imperial times. Rice agriculture, for instance, allocated water
carefully and sparingly under local village control backed up by large government projects.
The Communist government since 1949 has made enormous strides in making water available, in
developing hydropower, in controlling floods and managing rivers, and in regulating and rationalizing
water use. China controlled the Yellow River for the first time in history (except for a brief time in the
early 1300s). Irrigation was greatly expanded. City water and sewer systems were installed. However,
today, China faces a full-scale water crisis. Water resources are tapped out, and future progress must be
in efficiency of delivery and use, rather than in massive projects. China has only 6% of the world’s fresh
water, for 7% of the world’s area and 20% of the world’s population. Agriculture uses 65% of water in
China, as opposed to 59% worldwide.1
Analysis
The Yellow River no longer reaches the sea, and tens of millions of people along its former lower course
suffer desperate shortages of water. The Yangtze is also drying slowly in its lower course, and is so
compromised that its signature animal, the white-flag dolphin, has become extinct; the Yangtze
sturgeon is down in numbers to perhaps 100 as of 2014, and they are not reproducing.2 The sturgeon
was traditionally believed—by many, at least—to be a dragon rather than a fish, or at least a fishdragon, and the barbels around its mouth may be the original for the tendrils around the dragon’s
mouth in Chinese artistic representations. The other inspiration for the dragon, the Yangtze alligator, is
also on the verge of disappearing in the wild. So, China’s signature animal, in the form of the two real
animals that inspired it, may be gone soon—a terrible symbol of China’s environmental
mismanagement.
China’s lowland lakes, such as the famous Dongting and Poyang Lakes, are rapidly filling up with
sediment, and their water is too polluted to be usable. Attempts to clean up groundwater are more
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notable for the pollution they document than for their success. “Two-thirds of China’s 669 cities have
water shortages, more than 49% of its rivers are severely polluted, 80% of its lakes suffer from
eutrophication, and about 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water…”; waste and
outdated technology increase water use, while conferring no benefits. “More than 46,000 of the 87,000
dams and reservoirs built since the 1950s have surpassed their life spans, or will within 10 years”; they
are silting up or wearing out. “Many water projects… were rushed without following the national law of
environmental impact assessments and have caused enormous environmental and socioeconomic
impacts”.3 Local officials are rewarded for development of large projects, not for conservation or
efficiency, so incentives are now perverse. Even projects that passed environmental review are turning
out to have costs higher than their benefits.
Pollution
According to Jane Qiu, “…[f]ully 90% of China’s shallow groundwater is polluted… and an alarming 37% is
so foul that it cannot be treated for use as drinking water… The toll is significant: Every year, an
estimated 190 million Chinese fall ill and 60,000 die because of water pollution. According to the World
Bank, such illnesses cost the government $23 billion a year, or 1% of China’s gross domestic product.”4
Some 60% of groundwater is severely polluted; surface waters are comparably problematic, but can be
renewed naturally, whereas groundwater pollution is impossible to remove and will remain for centuries
or millennia; Ma Jun, a Chinese water expert, says that “the 300-odd rivers that drain the North China
Plain ‘are open sewers if they are not completely dry.’”5
Polluted groundwater used to irrigate crops is causing the crops to become toxic. Some “36% of rice
grown in Hunan province… was found to have cadmium levels above those specified by China’s food
standards regulation”;6 Hunan is one of the rice bowls of China, and cadmium causes horrible
pathologies. Food contamination, from polluted water or deliberate adulteration, is now rampant. “In
2011, China generated 65.21 billion tons of wastewater”; this may reach 784 billion tons by 2015.7
Jonathan Fenby reports further tragedies: “A 2012 report by the Land Ministry found that of 4,929
groundwater monitoring sites across the country, 41 per cent had extremely poor water quality… The
resulting annual human toll is put at 60,000 premature deaths.”8 A Science headline summarizes another
problem: “China’s Lakes of Pig Manure Spawn Antibiotic Resistance.”9 Half the antibiotics in China go
into pigs, to make them grow faster, and the antibiotics get into the water. At least one antibiotic
producer has also been caught dumping excess production into water. Raw sewage, untreated, is
regularly released into China’s lakes and rivers, and bacteria are being selected for antibiotic resistance
accordingly. Lack of accountability of officials and local enterprises is responsible. Similarly, Tao and Xin
report that “nearly half of 634 Chinese rivers, lakes and reservoirs tested in 2011 failed to meet drinking
standards,” which themselves are already rather minimal.10
Big Dams and Other Megaprojects
Dams generate many benefits: they produce a great deal of power that would otherwise be generated
by coal, regulate flooding, and regularize supply of irrigation water. They also help interior
transportation—easily navigable reservoirs cover what once were rapids. They make water available
more widely than it could otherwise be, via pumping and canals. Above all, they store water and
regularize the flow of rivers. Whether they are cost-effective in the long term is the real issue. 11
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Dams are often planned with inadequate attention to cost/benefit ratios. Landslides, siltation, damage
to downstream fisheries, loss of villages to rising waters, and many other problems have occurred.
Protesters have been suppressed, though dam protest movements are building in spite of this.12
China has refused to enter into international agreements on water and river management, partly
because China is upstream of several countries and covets the full benefits of that position.13 Being
downstream in China itself is bad enough; being downstream from China could be disastrous. The
Chinese government is, for instance, in constructing dams on the lower Mekong, which threaten to wipe
out that river’s ecology and devastate Cambodia’s agriculture. Similar plans for the Irrawaddy, Salween,
and Bhramaputra are frightening Burma and India. China is also funding big and ecologically
irresponsible dams in Africa and elsewhere.
China’s big dams are largely for hydropower. Even here, however, it appears that poor planning has
limited the value of development. Dozens of dams on the Dadu River of Sichuan were built without
planning for coordinating and transmitting power. Overall, China has the potential to produce 2.2
trillion KwH of hydroelectricity, but produces only one trillion that actually reaches consumers. Leakage,
poor grid coordination, waste of water due to lack of grid capacity, and other problems lead to wastage
greater than the combined total electric power use of Germany and France.14 China promises to address
the overall issue, but doing so will require massive development of the national grid.
Other considerations, including the rights and livelihoods of the less affluent, receive little attention in
planning dams. Political repression faces those who protest. Huge dams, climaxing in the Three Gorges
Dam, have led to massive displacement of people, and geological instability—yet siltation is filling these
dams much faster than expected, and they will be useless in a few decades. On recent visits to China I
have seen up to half the reservoirs in some areas ruined by silt infill. The rapid siltation, in turn, is the
result of deforestation and poor farming practices, both of which are the results of specific Communist
policies that reversed previous good care.
The Three Gorges Dam was a disaster for the Yangtze River’s endemic fish; a reserve was declared
upstream, a 500-km stretch of river (350 km on the Yangtze, the rest on main tributaries). However, as
is typical of Communist conservation, this was deceptive. The reserve lasted only as long as it took the
engineers to plan and commence new dams.
Meanwhile, pollution, low and unreliable water levels, and loss of valuable fisheries are the lot of the
Yangtze downstream from Three Gorges. China now has or is planning over 25,000 big dams, more than
the rest of the world currently has; North America has only 8,000. Moreover, the damage includes loss
of incomes among displaced and downstream poor, loss to flooding of prime farmland, extermination of
species, and displacement of indigenous groups—while the benefits are banal: more power and more
irrigation control—invariably benefiting rich businessmen more than the poor majority.
More irrational are the artificial ornamental and recreational lakes now appearing widely in China. They
are being created even in the deserts of Ningxia and the drought-afflicted basins of Shaanxi.15 They get
their water from the major rivers, including the Yellow River. Local governments, unaccountable to the
people in general but under constant pressure to deliver quick economic benefits, seem largely
responsible. The irrationality of maximizing short-term benefits at the expense of medium-term and
long-term ones increases apace.
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A final threat is a plan for a seawall all along the coast. This would probably do little in the long run to
deal with sea level rises or storms, but would destroy or devastate coastal wetlands, which are critically
important for all the east Siberian shorebirds and many other bird species, some acutely endangered
(such as the Spoon-billed Sandpiper). The plans are proceeding with little attention to ecology or
environmental concerns.16
A vast project to transfer water from the wet south to the dry north has come on stream (literally), and
is alleviating the water shortages of the north. It will be extended over time, and will solve many of the
problems of supply. However, many cities are not buying into it; the water is, of course, extremely
polluted, it costs an appreciable amount, and cities would have to change their systems. Thus they
continue (so far) to over-pump groundwater.17 Hopefully, the added water will recharge some
groundwater supplies. The project cannot be developed much further, because the south needs the
water for rice agriculture and growing cities.
The energy/power trade-off is serious. Desalinating seawater requires enormous power inputs,
recycling and reclamation only somewhat less. The more water is conserved, the more energy is used.
Obviously, efficiency is needed, but can go only so far. Meanwhile, coal and fracking for gas and oil
continue to be live options. Shale-gas extraction by fracking is now contaminating more of the
groundwater. Wind, solar, and even hydroelectric power are better for water resources than fossil fuels
when both water use and pollution are taken into account. Coal remains basic, but mining and
processing it consumes much water, and burning it causes much pollution, and nuclear power requires
much water for cooling. It cannot be China’s long-range future.18 Some alternatives, such as biofuel,
use even more water. China must convert toward wind and solar, and is slowly doing so. China is now
the world’s largest maker of solar panels.
Structural Causes of the Problems
In water management as in other resources, China has gone for short-term benefits that occasion later
but far greater costs. China has also followed a long-standing tradition of dealing with problems
through massive construction of infrastructure, rather than through increasing efficiency and rationality
of use. Critics point out that hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced to make room for
the canals and pipelines, but Beijing’s water problem is still not solved, partly because no one is
addressing the demand problem—there is little interest in efficiency of use, and very little interest
(understandably) in raising the low price of water.
For these reasons, water is now being put ahead of energy by China’s planners, since the crisis is more
critical and immediate. Dams, irrigation expansion, and giant water transfer projects have about run
their course, producing vast benefits but also vast costs in the form of pollution and waste, which have
become the central problems. The benefits of environmental wreckage have largely been reaped, and
often squandered, by the super-rich, while the costs are now coming due, and will be paid by the entire
human race—especially the poor. Critics point to widespread corruption: independence of local
planners is rewarded but not for conservation, hence the top-down and often unresponsive nature of
planning and governance.
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Policy Implications
China must now move away from showcase projects to grass-root management for efficiency, for watersparing technologies, for best-use allocation in the inevitable conflicts, and for rationalized water
pricing.19
A few good ideas for improving water quality are already being considered.20 Water could be most
easily saved by giving up irrigation in areas better used for pasture, such as Inner Mongolia, and in urban
dry lands such as around Beijing, where groundwater is depleting fast. Inner Mongolia loses much of its
water in the form of agricultural products sent to the rest of China. Other dry lands areas, such as
Xinjiang and Tibet, are also facing problems with overuse of water for irrigation, often of highly waterdemanding crops. As China expands its economic investment in the dry lands, the government must
make more and more difficult decisions.
Pollution control will require major treatment of sewage and effluent, but the greater need is for making
the polluters pay the costs of pollution and cleanup. If they were charged not only with damage to
water resources, but with the damage to human life and health, they would immediately change. Until
then, there is little hope for relief.
Water pricing is another area needing remedy. The government has understandably done everything to
keep water cheap, a need given China’s millions of poor, including small farmers using irrigation. But
now there must be some change in policy, probably with tiered pricing such that giant firms pay more
both relatively and absolutely.
China’s centralized, authoritarian leadership could quickly implement reforms. Excellent proposals to
conserve water, reduce pollution, and control water use have been made. There are, however, major
structural barriers, especially the rush for production at all costs, and the entrenched and often corrupt
bureaucracy.
E. N. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, and author of
numerous books, including Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture.
Views and assessments articulated in the CPI Policy Papers are that of the authors. They do not
necessarily represent the views of the CPI at the University of Nottingham.
Endnotes
1
Anderson, E. N. (2014) Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania Press; Pietz, David A. (2015) Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China. Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press.
2
BBC News (2014) “Ancient Sturgeon of China’s Yangtze ‘Nearly Extinct.’” BBC News Online, Sept. 15,
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29201926; Smith, Richard (2015). “China’s Communist-Capitalist
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Ecological Apocalypse.” Truthout, online, posted June 21, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-scommunist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse.
3
Liu, Jianguo, and Wu Yang (2012) “Water Sustainability for China and Beyond.” Science 337:649-650.
4
Qiu, Jane (2011) “China to Spend Billions Cleaning Up Groundwater.” Science 334:745.
5
Smith, op. cit., 14-15.
6
Yang, X. Jin (2013) “China’s Rapid Urbanization.” Science 342:310.
7
Wang, Zhiwei (2012) “China’s Wastewater Treatment Goals.” Science 338:604.
8
Fenby, Jonathan (2014) Will China Dominate the 21st Century? Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 87.
9
Larson, Christina (2015) “China’s Lakes of Pig Manure Spawn Antibiotic Resistance.” Science 347:704.
10
Tao, Tao, and Kunlun Xin (2014) “A Sustainable Plan for China’s Drinking Water.” Nature 511:527-528.
11
Tilt, Bryan (2014) Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power. New York,
Columbia University Press.
12
Dai Qing (1998) The River Dragon Has Come! The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze.
Translated by Ming Yi. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe; Forney, Matthew (2005) “Power to the People.” Time, June
27, pp. 46-48.
13
Gleick, Peter (2012) “China Dams.” In The World’s Water, vol. 7: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources,
Peter Gleick, ed. Washington, Island Press. Pp. 127-142.
14
Smith, Richard (2015) “China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse.” Truthout, online, posted June 21,
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse; Stanway, David
(2015) “Dam Waste: Planning Chaos Drains China’s Hydro Ambitions.” Reuters, posted June 7.
15
Liu Hongqiao and He Linlin (2012) “Lost in an Artificial Lake Craze.” Caixin Online, posted Oct. 26.
16
Ma, Zhijun; David S. Melville; Jianguo Liu; Ying Chen; Hongyan Yang; Wenwei Ren; Zhengwang Zhang;
Theunis Piersma; Bo Li (2014) “Rethinking China’s New Great Wall.” Science 346:912-914.
17
Chen Te-Ping (2015) “Cities in China’s North Resist Tapping Water Piped from the South.” Wall Street Journal,
April 22, www.wsj.com%2farticles%2fcities-in-chinas-north-resist-tapping-water-piped-from-south-1429781402
18
Tan et al., op cit.
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19
Anderson, E. N. (2014a) Environmental Ruin: The Drag on China’s Future. Paper, California Sociological
Association, annual conference, Riverside, CA. (Available on website www.krazykioti.com.)
20
Tan et al., op cit.; Tao and Xin, op cit.