China’s effort to pump water from the Yangtze basin to the arid
and heavily populated north has been stalled for years among
mounting concerns about the plan’s ecological, financial, and
political impact. The city of Tianjin, a coastal port near the
capital, Beijing, has instead turned to seawater desalination as
an alternative to the so-called South–North Water Diversion
Scheme. It’s a modest solution. Tianjin has water resources of
3.56 billion cubic meters, outstripped each year by demand. But
solving China’s water crisis may lie beyond large-scale
engineering projects like the $62 billion scheme. In northern
China, the disparity between water supply and demand is evident.
The heavily polluted Yellow River, Beijing’s principle source of
water, accounts for 2 percent of the country’s runoff yet
irrigates 15 percent of the crops and supplies water to 140
million people, about 12 percent of the population. In 2008, the
Xinhua news agency reported that four billion tonnes of
industrial waste and sewage were di