Situated south and east of immense deserts, Beijing has begun tapping reservoirs, rivers and canals across eastern China to aid its transformation into a water-rich oasis for this summer’s Olympic Games.

     The Chinese capital, set to stage the Olympics for the first time ever in August, recently activated an intricate latticework of waterways – manmade and natural, ancient and modern – to provide back-up H2O for the Games.

     “Athletes from all over the world will come to China to join the Olympic Games, so Beijing is implementing its masterplan to provide the very highest quality of water,” said Huang, a researcher at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission.  The commission is in charge of diverting Yellow River waters to supplement Beijing’s fragile natural supplies.

     More than 150 million cubic meters of Yellow River water is being channelled via a network of canals stretching across three provinces to refill a lake south of Beijing, after the capital first taps the higher quality lake system.  A parallel project is diverting water to the east coast resort of Qingdao, which is hosting the Olympics sailing competitions.

     Landlocked Beijing, built a sandstorm away from the Ordos and Gobi deserts, has been perenially plagued by thirst.  And its centuries-long quest for water is now being joined by cities and villages, factories and farmers, across northern China.

     Over the last century, a population explosion, an industrial revolution and the hyper-speed expansion of cities have all fuelled water shortages across vast sections of the North China plain.  The north’s Yellow River, the lifeline of Chinese civilization since Neolithic times, became so overused that it sometimes ran dry before reaching its estuary on the east coast.

     Huang and other experts said that the current rerouting of the Yellow River to buoy the Olympic Games is just a precursor to a massive hydro-engineering project that will see three human-carved rivers carry water from southern China to the arid, desert-dotted north.  The water transfer scheme – the largest in human history - is designed to ultimately divert more than 40 billion cubic meters of water annually from China’s longest river, the Yangtze, and its tributaries to the parched plains of the north.

     Plans to crisscross China with a matrix of canals, rivers, lakes and reservoirs were initially proposed by Chairman Mao Zedong shortly after his founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.  But those plans, high in risk, cost and complexity, were frozen for half a century. 

     Mao’s designs to add three jagged blue waterways to Chinese maps, across the east, center and far west of the country, were revived right after Beijing in 2001 won its bid to host the upcoming Olympics, said Yang Xiaoping, a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

      China has a long history of expertise in building canals.  During the conquest of rival states and kings in a decade-long battle to become China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang in the third century BC often followed brutal invasions with post-war reconstruction projects (with corvee labor) that included canals and irrigation systems.

       The leaders of the similarly shortlived Sui Dynasty (581-681 AD) oversaw the completion of the imperial Grand Canal, which ferried everything from grain to traders and aristocrats along a waterway stretching more than 1700 kilometers between the southeastern city of Hangzhou and the North China plain.

      The Yellow River Commission’s Huang said that portions of the Grand Canal will be modernized and expanded as it is transformed into the world’s longest aqueduct, to transport water from the Yangtze, through a tunnel burrowed beneath the Yellow River, and on to northern China.  This eastern section of China’s diversion scheme is slated for completion by 2010.

     The scheme’s central, 1200-kilometer waterway will likewise be channelled underground as its passes the Yellow River and courses on to the Chinese capital.

      The US$60-billion megaproject’s controversial western route would depend on a series of canals and tunnels being carved along one edge of the Tibetan plateau in western China. “The very expensive and technically challenging western route involves working on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau – 3,000 to 5,000 meters above sea level – and will involve overcoming some major engineering and climatic challenges,” said James Nickum, a professor at Tokyo Jogakkan College.

     This route, which would transfer water from the upper reaches of the Yangtze into the upper reaches of the Yellow River, will require tunnels to be chiselled through the earthquake-prone Bayankala Mountains, added Nickum, who recently conducted a study of the project for the UNDP.  

     Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts, said that China's transfer of water from the water-rich southern river basins to the drier Yellow River basin and North China Plain could spark disputes between those losing and gaining access to water along each route, or protests by some of the 300,000 Chinese slated to be resettled. 

     Postel said that in the year 2000, “thousands of farmers in the Yellow River basin of eastern China clashed with police over a government plan to recapture runoff from a local reservoir for cities, industries, and other users.”  She added: “ There is certainly potential for more disputes within China over land, water, and pollution” as the new diversion projects gain momentum.

     She also predicted that conflicts over water could ricochet across Asia: “By 2015, nearly 3 billion people - 40 percent of the projected world population - are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize enough water to satisfy the food, industrial, and domestic needs of their citizens,” Postel said. “This scarcity will translate into heightened competition for water between cities and farms, between neighboring states and provinces, and at times between nations.”

     Aaron Wolf, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University, said that “China’s water conflicts are an interesting byproduct of the country’s increasing openness.”  He added that “resistance to environmental degradation exploded in the 1980s as the Soviet Union opened up.”

     Most Western and Chinese scholars who have studied China’s water diversion projects agree that there is solid popular backing for the eastern and central routes, along with overwhelming support for any measures aimed at bolstering the Beijing Olympics.

     Chen Xiqing, an expert on hydrology at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, said “As an environmental coalition becomes stronger in China, it is putting more pressure on the government and pushing for more citizen participation in environmental problem-solving.”

     The government is using popular support for the Olympics and widespread calls for cleaner water to rapidly complete the eastern and central routes of the water diversion project.

     But the fate of the third waterway, along the edge of Tibet, may be in doubt.  “My guess is that this western route will become more and more difficult to complete as people have more freedom to speak out against this project,” said Chen.