Yellow River Giving China New Sorrow

She gave birth to one of the world’s most glorious ancient civilizations. For more than 4,000 years, she has nurtured billions of fields and farmers spread alongside her. Millions still rely on her bounty today.

But like so many working mothers, the Yellow River is exhausted, her resources dwindling, her energy flagging. The 3,600-mile-long waterway known throughout history as “China’s sorrow” because of a penchant for spilling over is now causing despair for precisely the opposite reason: It is drying up.

“We depend on the Yellow River for our lives,” said Wu Jiachun, a wiry farmer in this dusty hamlet in China’s Shandong province in the east. “But I haven’t watered my fields once since sowing season last October.”

Wu’s predicament is a woefully familiar one as overuse, poor planning and dry climatic conditions deplete one of this country’s most vital water systems, affecting both rural and urban residents alike. While the world’s attention focused last summer on the devastating Yangtze River floods in central and southern China, northern China--fed by the Yellow River and home to half the country’s 1.2 billion people--was grappling with its own water problem: a worsening shortage of enormous proportions.

More than 300 of the north’s 600 cities suffer from a lack of water, so acute in some places that residents are allotted a meager trickle for only a few hours each day. Large metropolises like Beijing, and industrial centers such as the city of Taiyuan, have pumped so much water from underground sources that the aquifers cannot keep up.

Here in Shandong province, China’s breadbasket, many farmers count themselves lucky if they can irrigate their fields once a year. In 1997--the worst year on record--the Yellow River was so drained by the time it coursed through Shandong, its last stop before the sea, that it failed to reach the ocean for a staggering 266 days. Some tributaries and lakes have vanished.

“Water is desperately short,” said Daniel Gunaratnam, an expert at the World Bank who is based in Beijing.

China’s water deficit ranges between 22 billion and 33 billion tons, Gunaratnam estimates--about five to seven times the amount that Southern California uses a year. By 2030, the shortfall could rise as high as 110 billion tons as the population increases to 1.5 billion.

The country’s troubles stem from a cruel trick of nature on China and the heavy demands of China on nature.

Although the Chinese population is split relatively evenly between the north and south, arable land and available water are not so equally divided. Just 38% of China’s farmland is in the south, but the region enjoys 82% of China’s water resources. By contrast, northern China boasts 62% of the country’s cultivated soil, but a paltry 18% of its water.

A Once-Abundant Waterway in Retreat

For millenniums after Chinese civilization sprang up along the banks of the Yellow River, the waterway’s abundance was enough--sometimes too much.

Constant overflows claimed lives and livelihoods. A century ago, a vast swath of the Shandong plain lay submerged under the river’s muddy flow, which destroyed fields and washed away pieces of the delicate pottery, long buried, that the earliest Chinese settlers there fashioned 4,000 years ago.

Since then, those settlers’ modern descendants have grown exponentially in number across China--by 700 million, or 2 1/2 times the entire U.S. population, in the past 50 years alone. Even so, for the inhabitants who sheltered next to it, China’s “mother river,” as many locals call the Yellow, still offered an embarrassment of riches after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949.

“Forty years ago, there was so much water that you could sit on the embankment, wait for the fish to swim by, and go down and catch them,” said Li Wendong, a farmer in Jijia, a village neighboring Dawang.

Li, 43, continued sadly, “There are no fish now because there’s not enough water for them to grow.”

Instead, Li’s black-coated sheep forage for food where once they would have drowned. The river’s retreat has left behind vast expanses of parched earth, shivered into crazy shapes like a broken pane of brown glass.

“People can even drive on the riverbed, especially in the eastern part of Henan [province] and Shandong,” said Liu Yonggong, a professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing.

The paucity of water has exacted a huge economic toll on the world’s most-populous nation.

Up to 33 million tons in crops are lost each year because of drought, comparable in value to the damage wrought by floods, Gunaratnam said. Four years ago, chronic water shortages drove down Shandong’s grain harvest by nearly 3.3 million tons--enough to feed 9 million people, according to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.

This has prompted fear in some quarters that China, the world’s leading grain producer, may turn to massive grain imports to compensate for declining yields, triggering a price increase that would send shock waves through the world food supply, especially in poorer countries.

Chinese industry also suffers from the dearth of water, losing as much as $28 billion a year in output.

Ironically, the turnabout in water availability, from too much to too little, is a direct result of China’s economic boom in the past 20 years. The country’s market-oriented reforms have pulled millions out of poverty--but at tremendous cost to its natural resources.

Farmers now push for higher and higher yields, which demand more and more water, especially with the widespread use of inefficient irrigation systems. Heavy industries present another major drain.

Affluent urban lifestyles also strain the water supply, as residents snap up Western-style toilets and washing machines, and consume more meat and alcohol, which requires more grain--and therefore more water--to feed livestock and to produce liquor.

Moreover, high levels of pollution have snatched away water suitable for irrigation and for drinking. In some areas, river water is “so poisonous you can’t use it,” Liu said.

Excessive Pumping Draining Aquifers

Desperate for usable water, both the cities and rural areas of the north have turned to underground sources. But excessive pumping has outpaced the aquifers’ ability to replenish themselves.

A 1997 study conducted by Liu discovered that the water tables beneath much of northern China are shrinking by about 5 feet every year. Farmers are drilling deeper and deeper wells, but “at some point, people can no longer afford to pump water from ever-increasing depths,” said Lester Brown, president of Worldwatch.

Such overuse gives residents around Beijing a sinking feeling--literally. Three suburban neighborhoods have dropped by as much as 14 inches during the past decade, breaking pipes and causing other damage as the ground gives way over the compacted water tables. The Chinese capital sucks out 220 million tons of subterranean water a year.

To slow down the depletion, some local authorities have launched conservation campaigns, erecting billboards and running TV commercials exhorting residents to “save every drop of water.”

But attitudes such as Li Yuan’s are hard to combat.

“Having a washing machine and shower is my right and encouraged by the government as well. Haven’t you read newspaper stories about the government encouraging [economic] consumption?” the 37-year-old telecommunications employee asked. “I don’t think that by taking fewer showers I can increase the water supply.”

One possible solution is raising the price of water, incredibly cheap by Western standards. After a series of rate increases, Beijingers still pay only about 11 cents a ton--equivalent to about 265 gallons, nearly what Angelenos use per capita every two days. In rural areas, the cost can be less than half a cent. The low prices induce apathy about waste among much of the population; in public buildings, broken taps spewing water 24 hours a day are not uncommon, with no one around who cares enough to repair them.

The state is also trying to come up with an enforceable national policy for equitable water distribution, partly to prevent regional disputes, which have already broken out in some areas. Downstream users gripe that those along the upper reaches of the Yellow River hog the water without thought to the needs of people below.

For the longer term, engineers are studying the long-discussed possibility of hauling water up to northern China from the Yangtze River or its tributaries in the south. These would be massive projects requiring billions of dollars, posing a tricky political and economic calculus for the Communist regime.

Pressure on Officials to Address Shortage

But the Beijing leadership may have little choice as the shortage mounts. Beyond increased demand, Chinese scientists forecast that global warming will further sap water supplies in coming years through increased evaporation, a development that could extend the boundaries of deserts in the north.

Here in Shandong, provincial authorities are already crafting plans for a modest price hike and allotments that are more suitable to the needs of farmers, who use 8.8 billion tons of water a year to irrigate 20 million hectares of land.

The city of Jinan, the provincial capital, has also moved to protect its biggest tourist attraction: a collection of 72 natural springs, with such poetic names as Gushing-from-the-Ground Spring and Pearl Spring.

Their beauty inspired one of China’s most famous writers, Lao She, to rhapsodize a few decades ago:

Look at the three big springs.

They roll and foam day and night

throughout the year. . . .

Always so pure, always so lively,

always so bright,

gushing, gushing, gushing,

never tiring, never retreating

only nature has this power!

But a recent visit showed the drubbing that nature has taken from humankind. In a sad illustration of northern China’s plight, Gushing-from-the-Ground Spring didn’t: It barely managed to burp a small stream of bubbles.