China faces major water crisis  By Richard Spencer  July 2, 2005
A fisherman works his net in the brown waters of the Yangtze.
Photo: AFP  Cannon and rocket-launchers still protect Beijing
from their vantage point in the Fragrant Hills, just as the
Great Wall nearby has done for centuries.  But these cannon are
pointing up into the clouds and their foe is thirst.  The
Fragrant Hills gun emplacement is part of an ever-more desperate
quest to counter its chronic water shortage. Whenever the sky
clouds over, the guns fire shells containing silver iodide that
is supposed to precipitate rainfall.  China has the largest
rain-seeding program in the world, with two military aircraft,
30 cannon and 20 rocket-launchers dedicated to the task around
Beijing alone.  Those efforts are dwarfed by others in the arid
north-western regions, but most provinces have some capability
to seed for rain.  Zhang Qiang, the deputy head of the Beijing
artificial climate office, admits it is "hard to quantify how
much rain falls because