China's Water Problems Run Deep

While its southern taps won’t run dry, China's north faces pollution and distribution challenges.

A man catches fish in the Huangpu river across the Wujing Coal-Electricity Power Station in Shanghai on
Part of the world's most populous country is becoming increasingly parched.

While China is not in danger of losing all of its available surface water – à la South Africa's Cape Town's "Day Zero" – it has a longstanding water crisis underground.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - FEBRUARY 14: A man make his way past a police officer on duty at the Newlands spring tap, on their way to refill water bottles at one of many fresh mountain spring that runs through the city on February 14, 2018.

Citizens of Cape Town reduce their water usage in face of Day Zero, the day the city will turn off it's taps as a result of a three year drought plaguing the Western Cape, on February 14, 2018.
(Photo by Charlie Shoemaker for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Photos: Cape Town's Drought

EXPAND GALLERY

The issue of a country's water supply became more pressing earlier this year when Cape Town officials announced a looming shortage of the South African city's water supply, brought on by combination of factors that included an El Niño-triggered drought. Cape Town officials say a combination of conservation measures has pushed "Day Zero" – the day when drinking water taps run dry – to next year.

In China, water supplies are a sensitive topic in a country trying to sustain its decadeslong high levels of economic growth. “China really has both issues with quantity – meaning water is too scarce in some parts of the country, too abundant in others – but then also has, I think, a much more severe quality issue," says Scott Moore, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

First, it has an uneven geological distribution of water that doesn't meet its commercial needs – China's fresh groundwater resources are overwhelmingly concentrated in the south and far west, while nearly half of its population is in the north. The water shortages in the north – such as those experienced in major cities such as Beijing and Tianjin – are further compounded by the push for economic development and growing population demands.

"The north has less water but needs more for its mining, industrialization and population, while the south has [an] abundance but suffers [from] flooding," says Fengshi Wu, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Asia Institute who specializes in environmental politics, Chinese politics and global governance.

And, while the Mao-inspired, industrial feat of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project was created to mitigate growing demands and competing interests among northern provinces by bringing water from the saturated south to the arid north, Charles Parton, a former diplomat for the European Union and United Kingdom who focused extensively on China's politics, says statistics show that the project is unsustainable long term.

"It at best buys a little bit of time," Parton says. "The situation is really quite dire."

Moore adds that the expansive project – which, as of 2014, had already cost China more than $79 billion to install – is an example of the communist government's non-transferable leadership for other countries facing water issues.

"It's like, 'OK, we have this imbalance so we're just going to engineer our way out of that and overcome it,'" Moore says. "It basically preserves some level of stability for north China for certain industries and agriculture in north China, but it's not necessarily what you would recommend from a sustainability point of view."

And then the quality issue enters the scene. China, in its efforts to rise to the world stage as a global leader, has taken on a lot of the world's dirty, industrial jobs – producing steel, textiles and rubber for exports, and using coal for energy – that are known to be giant polluters. Their production contributes not only to the smog choking China's cities but also to its soil and water pollution problems, which further exacerbate its limited clean, freshwater supply, Parton says.

JIAOZUO, CHINA - NOVEMBER 09: (CHINA OUT) Middle line of the South-to-north Water Transfer Project Henan Section is ready on November 9, 2014 in Jiaozuo, Henan province of China. 731 kilometers main channel of the South-to-north Water Transfer Project within Henan province was completed successfully. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The Henan section of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project is seen in Jiaozuo, China in November of 2014. As of 2014, The massive project had already cost China more than $79 billion to install. (VCG/GETTY IMAGES)

"They've put a lot of money into it, if you look at the figures, for investment in controlling pollution in particular. But controlling pollution is one thing; it's actually cutting the use" of contaminating industries that will effectively curb the water pollution problem, Parton says.

"I don't think this is something that's escapable forever, and it's already having an effect in terms of living status," Parton continues. "Pollution is a real problem, and that detracts from the amount of [clean] water that you've got."

In part, confronting these environmental issues in the past has been thwarted by too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

"The way that China is set up from a political-economic perspective is that although decision-making is very tightly controlled by the central government and the party, in reality a lot of the implementation is left to local officials, and they're actually giving quite a bit of freedom to decide how they implement centrally determined goals and targets and priorities," Moore says.

Getting everyone on board with putting these environmental regulations into place therefore may be easier said than done, Wu says.

'Polluting industries are (...) 'golden hens' for local governments to gain revenues," Wu says. "The dominant approach in Chinese regulatory style is to target industries, not individual consumers. Should the government pay more attention in this aspect in (the) future? Yes. But regulating better industries, particularly the big ones owned by the state itself, is an urgent task to complete."

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To address this, China's President Xi Jinping in the past few months has condensed multiple bureaucratic departments down to the Ministry of Ecological Environment and the Ministry of Natural Resources to mitigate the problem of unclear management. He has also aggressively gone after industries for water pollution, furthering China's declaration of a "war on pollution" from five years ago.

As for the consumer side, the Chinese are trying to conserve water with programs such as the three red lines initiative that aims to create a cap-and-trade system that will increase water efficiency and limit total water use with national and local water caps by 2030.

"That's a pretty fascinating example of something that, against my knowledge, no other country of comparable size has tried to do, and it's an astounding level of ambition and complexity," Moore says.

Overall, China's leaders are trying multiple measures to handle a complex problem.

"In addition to making water usage (and) pollution more costly for industries, the Chinese government has tried to encourage improving energy efficiency and technological innovation," Wu says. "Probably never 'enough' to critics, but implementing environmental standards and regulation is not a simple thing in China (and anywhere else)."

"China is actually doing a lot more than we think, and if we think that China is a laggard on these issues, or that it’s going to weaken China’s competitiveness or the government or something, we’re deeply mistaken," Moore says