With Little Fanfare, China Begins First Phase Of South-North Water Transfer Project
The Chinese government has often brandished its feats of building vast dams and channeling rivers as triumphs of engineering. Not this time. This week a first leg of what the government calls the world’s biggest water transfer project officially started in a mood of subdued resignation.
On Tuesday, the eastern route of the South-to-North Water Diversion project began officially drawing water from the Yangtze River and carrying it to Dezhou in Shandong Province, where urbanization and industrialization have devoured local sources, as they have in much of northern China, according to state media reports. The project is, along with the Three Gorges Dam, an example of the Chinese government’s willingness to apply huge resources to harness rivers for national development.
Construction began 11 years ago, after the government endorsed the plan as a solution to China’s increasingly acute water needs: Take water from the relatively abundant south — especially the Yangtze River, along two routes, through central and eastern provinces — to supply Beijing and other increasingly needy parts of the north.
But the project has been troubled. It has suffered delays, cost overruns, feuds among officials over who pays for and who gets the water, and bitter contention over resettling more than 300,000 people, mostly poor farming families, to make way for an expanded dam and canals along the central route. And water along both routes, especially the eastern one, still suffers from worrisome pollution.
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http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/a-quiet-start-to-south-north-water-transfer/?ref=world&_r=1
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