Water in China has a basic geographical problem, since the south of the country floods very frequently while the north is in a drought situation. To solve this, the Asian giant has been carrying out for decades what is probably the most ambitious hydraulic engineering project in the history of humanity, since they are literally moving nature.
Making history. If there is a country capable of altering the face of the Earth to guarantee its economic and demographic survival, it is China. The premise is as simple to understand as it is pharaonic to execute, since what they are doing is transferring water from the rich Yangtze River basin in the south to the arid plains in the north, where a large part of the country’s population, agriculture and industry is concentrated, but barely 20% of its water resources.
The result of this is the ‘South-North Water Transfer Project’ which has a colossal network of canals, pipelines and pumping stations that are defying geography.
The figures of a titanic work. To estimate the size of this project, it is enough to go to official sources, since, according to the latest updates from the Ministry of Water Resources of China, the infrastructure has no parallel in the world.
Specifically, to date, the system has managed to transfer more than 70,000 million cubic meters of water through its central and eastern route. From a hydrological perspective, as detailed in CEDEX technical schemes on platforms such as Hispagua, this is equivalent to moving entire rivers artificially.
The beneficiaries There have been 150 million people who have seen how this injection of water has even allowed an “ecological replenishment”, recovering the water table in areas of the north that had been depleted for decades. But massive intervention on the ground always has a “B side.”
The rivers. As China redraws its water map, an alarming fact emerged, as official censuses revealed that tens of thousands of rivers appeared to have disappeared in the country in just a few decades. Here the specialist media have raised great global concern about this phenomenon, since it is not known if this transfer was drying out the country at an unprecedented rate.
The answer. It was given to us by an article published in 2019 that pointed out that the massive “disappearance” of the channels was not due to the fact that they had evaporated overnight due to dams or climate change, but rather to a problem in cartographic methodology. That is, historically, censuses included what scientists call ‘pseudo-rivers’ and used counting criteria that were not supported.
Now that they have applied a much better and more consolidated hydraulic classification, the number of these “lost” rivers has been drastically reduced.
The ecological cost. The fact that rivers are not disappearing en masse from the maps does not mean that the megaproject is free, since modifying the flow of some of the most important basins on the planet entails risks that scientific literature has been monitoring for years.
Already in 2009, a classic review published in Wiley by researcher Zhang Quanfa warned of the profound ienvironmental implications of the transfer. Here he proposes that extracting such massive volumes from the south irreparably alters the Yangtze basin, causing an alteration of the southern aquatic ecosystem, or it has even been seen that as less fresh water reaches the mouth of the Yangtze, sea water penetrates inland, threatening the local supply and agriculture of the delta.
The demographic cost. Added to these environmental warnings is the institutional analysis of experts such as Mark Wang and Chen Li who point out the governance challenges and the enormous political and social friction generated. Here different critical organizations point out that the authorities have forced the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people and have required multimillion-dollar investments in treatment plants to prevent contaminated water from the south from ruining the reserves in the north.
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In | A small river lost between Russia and North Korea is testing something much bigger: China’s patience with both.
