China's `Mother River' is dying

Parched Yellow portends vast ecological doom

July 05, 2001|By Erling Hoh, Special to the Tribune.

LANZHOU, China — The Yellow River, cradle of China's civilization, has been reduced in many places to a trickling stream in the middle of a vast floodplain. All along the river's 3,400-mile-long course, its tributaries are dry.

In 1972, the Yellow River failed to complete its course to the Yellow Sea for the first time in recorded history. In 1997, the river's lower reaches were dry for more than 200 days.

The "Mother River" is a dying, severely polluted, seasonal river on the verge of becoming a continental ditch, and China's arid north is well on its way to what some experts believe could be one of the most far-reaching ecological catastrophes in history.

In Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia province, on the western leg of the wide loop the Yellow River makes through Inner Mongolia, a museum recently opened to educate people about the river's history and the importance of conservation. It is a somewhat contradictory place for such an exhibit because Ningxia is where the draining of the river begins in earnest.

The province, with a population of 6 million, has little rainfall and would be a desert without the Yellow River. Irrigation works are more than 2,000 years old. Since the communist revolution in 1949, agricultural land irrigated by the river has been expanded to 1.1 million acres from 316,000 acres. Part of this land is used to grow rice, which requires twice as much water as corn or sorghum.

Authorities allot Ningxia a yearly quota of 4 billion cubic meters of water out of the Yellow River's annual flow of 56 billion cubic meters. But according to the book "China's Water Crisis," Ningxia uses as much as 8 billion cubic meters per year.

"It has only rained twice in the whole year," said a man standing near the river in northern Ningxia.

He pointed to some small houses on the opposite bank. "Those houses are new," he said. "The people moved there because their villages up in the hills ran out of water."

Farther north, on the He Tao plain of Inner Mongolia, there is an even larger tract of irrigated land that seasonally consumes more than half of the Yellow River's water.

Sand dunes replace grass

In a village on the edge of the Gobi Desert, Tian Shenhai, 64, lives with her husband, son and daughter-in-law. They live in a house of sun-dried mud and straw; a sand dune pushes up against one of its walls. "Twenty years ago, the grass grew so high you couldn't see people," she said.

In the past, the family raised 300 sheep. Now, they can feed only 60 to 70. A new rule aimed at curtailing the growing desert of Inner Mongolia will go into effect soon, and the family no longer will be allowed to let the sheep graze freely.

A few thousand years of human activity have left their mark on the ecology of northern China. There was a time when more than 50 percent of the land was covered by forest. Now, forests are scarce.

Since the end of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the country's population has increased by 700 million. China has embarked on a program of rapid industrialization, and the strain on the land's ecology has reached unprecedented levels.

The most apparent sign is China's water crisis. Across northern China, the groundwater table is sinking by nearly 5 feet a year due to overpumping.

As water tables fall, satellite photographs show that hundreds of lakes and rivers are disappearing. In Shanxi province, the Fen River, which used to run through the capital, Taiyuan, has virtually ceased to exist. Aquifers beneath the city have been sharply reduced, and there is a question of whether this city of 2 million will have to move.

To alleviate Taiyuan's water shortage, an ambitious project to divert water 220 miles from the Yellow River to the Fen River is under way at a cost of $1.35 billion, of which the World Bank is contributing $400 million.

All along the Yellow, diversion and dam projects big and small are in progress. The inner provinces divert as much water as they can, leaving little for densely populated areas along the river's lower reaches, especially Shandong province, where water shortages have led to riots in the past few years.

The government's main response has been more dams and more diversion projects. Critics argue, however, that little effort is being focused on the roots of the water crisis: the deforestation of the inner provinces, the indiscriminate, uneconomical use of water for agriculture and outdated factories, the lack of a functioning pricing system and a lack of water treatment plants.

Last fall, the Chinese government announced its intention to go ahead with a gigantic project to divert water from the Yangtze River in three channels to the arid north, an idea reportedly conceived by Mao Tse-tung. According to estimates, about 20 billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze will be diverted annually to northern China.

Mighty Yangtze imperiled too

Although this constitutes only a fraction of the mighty Yangtze's annual flow, some scholars are warning that, eventually, it too will run dry.