Beijing dips its toes in troubled waters

BEIJING – For millennia, China’s great rivers have snaked their long, meandering courses across the country, providing the life-blood for Chinese civilization: water. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, 5,000 years of history and culture have unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in an otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity and dynamism in its wake.

But the effects of severe pollution, large-scale damming and climate change are combining to spell catastrophe for the rivers, with deeply worrying implications for the millions of Chinese who continue to depend on them.


Ten percent of the Yellow River today is sewage, little surprise when, according to the government, the volume of wastewater flowing into the river increased from about 2 billion tonnes in the 1980s to 4.3 billion tonnes by 2005. Experts say that since the 1950s the volume of water in the Yellow River has decreased by 75%, so that the once-mighty river has been reduced to a more or less seasonal body of water that usually dries up 800 kilometers before reaching the sea.

The diagnosis for the Yangtze is equally bleak. This year, the first annual health report for the river revealed 30% of its major tributaries to be heavily polluted with high levels of ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus. In 2006 alone, more than 26 billion tonnes of wastewater was pumped into the Yangtze, a river that flows through 11 provinces and municipalities. One-tenth of the main stream of the river is estimated to be in “critical condition”.

Asia Times