Why China is running dry

DOLKA, China — At the two glacial lakes that give birth to the Yellow River, a Tibetan nomad named Tsende stands at the river's edge and rolls up his pants. He says a dragon lives in the lakes, a god of rain. Two decades of drought convinced him the dragon is angry.

Hundreds of nomads, prodded by the government, have sold their herds and fled the land around the lakes. Others like Tsende have rammed a Buddhist prayer pole into a hillside and prayed to the dragon.

The source of the Yellow River, itself the water source for 140 million people in a country of about 1.3 billion, is in crisis, as scientists warn that the glaciers and underground water system feeding the river are gravely threatened. It is the latest burden for a river saturated with pollution and sucked dry by factories, growing cities and farming — with still more growth planned.

Curving through regions only intermittently touched by the country's boom, the waterway offers a tour of the pressures and contradictions bearing down on China, and of the government's efforts to address them. The river's twisting 3,400-mile path from the Qinghai grasslands to the Bohai Sea seems to encompass not just thousands of miles but thousands of years — from nomads like Tsende sleeping under tents made of animal hair to urbanites like Peng Guihang, a homemaker living in a new high-rise building in the city of Zhengzhou.

In between, in the ancient, irrigated oasis in the tiny region of Ningxia, farmers plant rice in the desert and treat the Yellow River like a bottomless well. In a pebbled, alien expanse along the river in Inner Mongolia, an enormous industrial region has arisen in only a few years.

Building booms

Most astonishing, cities beside the river like Yinchuan, Luoyang and Zhengzhou are racing to become China's next new regional urban center with almost hallucinatory building booms.

Nomads like Tsende are the descendants of ethnic Tibetans whose families have lived here for generations, to when the sparse region was part of Tibet, not China.

Last year, a local official approached Tsende with an offer: Sell his yaks and sheep and move to a township. His family would get a free cinder-block house and an annual stipend of 8,000 yuan, or about $1,000. Local cadres, responding to an edict from Beijing to reduce grazing, offered the same deal to every nomad around the lake.

Gyaring Lake and its twin, Ngoring Lake, are considered the source of the Yellow River. Scientists began studying the region after drought took hold in the 1980s. Grasslands were turning to desert, raising fears that the river's source could be endangered. Eventually, overgrazing was deemed to be the root of the problem, and local governments began moving nomads off the land.

Almost half of the roughly 400 families who once lived around Gyaring Lake have left. Mining and fishing are now banned.

Going deeper

More recently, though, Chinese scientists have concluded that the pressures from herding are only one part of a much broader problem. Liu Shiyin, a hydrologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other scientists discovered that the complicated water system feeding the lakes was in crisis. Underground water levels were sinking, and chains of smaller feeder lakes were receding or drying up altogether. Air temperatures were slowly rising, while the old pattern of two rainy seasons per year was down to one.

"We've found that the problem is much broader and is being caused by global climate change," said Liu, who is also a professor at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Institute.

Researchers found that the glaciers feeding the river had shrunk 17 percent in 30 years. Earlier this year, the official New China News Agency reported that glaciers across the entire Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which includes the Yellow River source region, are now melting at a rate of 7 percent a year because of global warming. The report also said average temperatures in Tibet had risen by 2 degrees since the 1980s, according to China's national weather bureau. At the source of the Yellow River, Liu said the combination of less rainfall and warming temperatures had thawed the surface layer of active permafrost and disrupted the underground water channels. Moisture is being absorbed deeper into the warmer ground, and less water is funneling into the Yellow River.

China ranks behind only the United States in carbon-dioxide emissions, which scientists consider the raw ingredient of global warming.

Frantic strategies

Water shortages are at crisis level in many regions. About 400 of China's 600 cities lack an adequate supply for future growth, and many are now making do by draining underground aquifers to dangerously low levels. Some coastal cities are building desalination plants to turn seawater into drinking water. Overall, China has one of the lowest per-capita water supplies in the world and one of the most uneven distributions of water. Northern China is home to 43 percent of the population but only 14 percent of the country's water supply.

To address that imbalance, the government has begun work on a grandiose, and controversial, "South-to-North" transfer project, which would pump water along channels from the Yangtze River in southern China to replenish the country's thirsty north, including the Yellow River.

Officials say they believe the plan, potentially the most expensive public-works project ever in China, is the best hope for maintaining economic growth in the north, but critics point to practical and environmental concerns, and are fighting to block plans for a channel through Qinghai.

Throughout history the Yellow River has spawned floods, and emperors who could not protect the people were said to have lost heaven's mandate to rule. The Communist Party has built more dams than any dynasty had, and the river is now an end-to-end plumbing project that many environmentalists fear is being plumbed to death.

For several years during the 1990s, the river ran so low that it failed to reach the sea. For the moment, engineers have corrected that problem, but the dams and dikes have accentuated a different one: The river is rising into the sky. The huge amount of sediment washing downstream is now pinched by so many dikes and interrupted by so many dams that it is pushing the bed of the river upward, which means as the river goes up, so must the height of dams to prevent floods.

Down a potholed street leading into an industrial park is a small sundries shop where Zhang Yueqing lives amid the choking pollution of one of China's newest industrial corridors.

Hulking factories spew blue smoke as hunched men shovel minerals into the red glow of open pit furnaces. They are making coke, silicon and other raw materials to be shipped elsewhere in China, as well as to Europe, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Furnace ash is spread over empty lots like black icing over a cake.

"If you are here in the morning, you'll see an inch of coal dust on the ground," said Zhang, 54. "We cough a lot. At night, sometimes the smoke is so thick that you can turn on your car lights and you still can't see where you are going."

His wife, Chen Fengying, 53, added: "We can't plant anything. We can't plant tomatoes or hot peppers. They cannot grow."

The industrial park sits along the river in the region that joins Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, part of an industrial colossus built in less than six years on the arid, water-starved land surrounding the city of Wuhai.

From coal to industry

The northernmost route of the Yellow River courses through the center of China's coal country. Under the planned economy in 1958, the central government founded Wuhai as the coal supplier for the state-owned steel maker, Baotou Steel.

But the collapse of the planned economy almost meant the collapse of Wuhai. By the early 1990s, local officials were debating how to save the city and built three coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to the east. But the city still needed jobs. So officials recruited investors to build the energy-intensive, heavy polluting industries that other regions no longer wanted.

The strategy worked. Before 1998, Wuhai had four factories. Now it has more than 400. In June, the New China News Agency reported that more than $50 billion in industrial development was planned for the 500-mile stretch of the river in Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Experts estimated that industrial demands for water would quintuple by 2010.

Decades of strip mining had already transformed some parts of coal country into vast tracts of denuded wasteland. Rapid industrialization made Wuhai a pollution nightmare. The Yellow River itself was already one of the most polluted rivers in the world. But suddenly clouds of polluted air were drifting hundreds of miles east to Beijing.

This spring, the problem finally forced official action. The state Environmental Protection Administration closed scores of smaller, dirtier coke factories. Local regulators demanded that other factories install better pollution equipment or face closure.

The nation's new face

From her fashionable apartment in one of the newest high-rises in the city of Zhengzhou, Peng Guihang is eating a bowl of dumplings on her enclosed balcony. A basketball game is playing on her flat-screen television. Her laptop is open on her marble coffee table. The only thing missing is neighbors. Peng and her family are among the first tenants in the unfinished district known as the "new city" of Zhengzhou.

"There is not much here yet," said Peng, seemingly not too worried. "The shops will probably open in two or three years."

Peng is part of a new consumer class that must grow and prosper for China to keep rising. It is for people like her that "new cities" are being built across the country. The view outside her apartment would be astounding if it were not common in many Chinese cities: a horizon filled with rising towers, each 25 stories or taller; a sleek exhibition center built beside an artificial lake stocked with colorful schools of carp; a half-built arts center resembling five massive concrete eggs. Construction cranes fill the sky in all directions.

This is the goal China is trying to reach — a nation of peasant farmers transformed into a modern, urban country. And yet so many cities are expanding so quickly, at the same time, and often following so much the same blueprint, that China's urbanization rush has alarmed national leaders and raised fears of overheating.

"Some local officials really don't understand how to properly urbanize," said Lu Dadao, a Beijing scholar who specializes in urbanization. "They want it to happen fast, and they want it to be big. They have all taken up urbanization without considering what the natural speed of it should be."

Along the Yellow River, major cities, and many smaller ones, are in the throes of construction booms, competing to emerge as dominant cities. In Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, officials are spending about $1.2 billion a year to build a government complex across hundreds of acres. It includes a huge provincial legislature, provincial ministry buildings, a government-owned five-star hotel, a residential compound for foreign entrepreneurs and an outdoor People's Plaza that can accommodate 30,000 people.

This is a common development blueprint in second-tier Chinese cities: using government money to build government districts in hopes that they will attract private real-estate development.

Stepping in

Rapid urbanization is already transforming the Yellow River region. Population in the region has nearly tripled since the 1950s. Government statistics show that roughly 4 billion gallons of wastewater are dumped into the river every year, double the amount from two decades ago. Every growing city, each trying to lure people and industry, is scouring for water. Last summer, the State Council, China's equivalent of a Cabinet, approved national regulations to improve controls over the Yellow River and better regulate water use, partly by raising prices. But officials agree that regulations alone are not enough to compensate for the rapidly rising demand for water. Water saved from farming must be diverted to industry. And cities along the river want to grow like cities on the country's prospering coast, even though the Yellow River region has none of the same natural advantages.

The "new city" where Peng lives is fashioned after the famed Pudong, the swamp-turned-financial district in Shanghai. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping visited undeveloped Pudong and exhorted China to build faster and bigger. What followed was an economic explosion that has changed the world. But China's new leaders are no longer encouraging projects like Pudong. They are trying to tamp down a runaway economy by ordering provinces to build slower and more judiciously, while cracking down on the corruption endemic to so many projects.

Indeed, so many large construction projects are so infused with corruption that urbanization has become a get-rich scheme for many officials. In the first six months of this year, Chinese prosecutors secured convictions in 1,608 major bribery cases, in which officials accepted kickbacks to facilitate construction projects.