On Diversion Project's Eve, Han River on Edge

The Han River gently glides through the heart of China, winding from north to south for 1,500 kilometers through a fertile valley that covers more than 150,000 square kilometers.

In Hubei Province alone, the Han is a lifeline for nearly 20 million people and tapped for economic activities that account for about half of the province's gross domestic product.

But all that economic growth has come at a high price for the river, its ecosystem and millions of people who rely on its water for life and livelihoods.

Some sections of the river are clean, but others are polluted. And now, the Han faces more pressure than ever with the accelerating construction of China's huge, nationwide South-North Water Diversion Project.

The middle section of the project is designed to divert water from the Han northward to slake the thirst of growing economies in Beijing and other dry areas of northern China. An eastern leg of the diversion is partially finished, and a western section may never be built.

Water flow on the middle and lower reaches of the Han will fall by 26 percent after the project's first phase is completed, according to an environmental assessment by the State Council's Office of the South-North Water Diversion Construction Project.

Critics say lower water levels will render many local farm irrigation canals useless, make shipping more difficult, hurt the river's self-cleaning capacity, and endanger one-third of its fish species.

Several experts in Hubei have warned that ecosystem damage on the river, which empties into the Yangtze River, may be worse than forecast. They say official data on the upper river's surface water volume is based on statistics compiled between 1956 and 1990. But the surface volume has declined since 1990 by, according to some experts, at least 10 percent.

Tale of Two Provinces

A formal groundbreaking is expected soon for the upper Han stretch of the diversion, called the Han-Wei Water Diversion Project, in Shaanxi Province. After its scheduled completion in 2015, the diversion is expected to improve lives and meet demands of local industry, especially in central Shaanxi, by tapping water from behind a dammed portion of the river called the Danjiangkou Reservoir.

But downriver and below the dam, many in Hubei are sitting on pins and needles. They're anxious because the project will divert water northward to the distant Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River.

The project's first phase will divert as much as 1 billion cubic meters of water per year – an amount equal to 25 percent of the Danjiangkou Reservoir.

The second phase is expected to raise the total diversion to 1.5 billion cubic meters. And by 2015, the middle and lower reaches of the Han will lose at least 10.5 billion cubic meters of water every year.

During interviews with Caixin, many Hubei residents and officials criticized the Han-Wei project, calling it an unfolding disaster. One bone of contention is that, during years of planning, neither Shaanxi government nor central government Ministry of Water Resources officials sought input from Hubei officials and residents.

Not until mere months before the project's start did Hubei representatives actually sit down with Shaanxi representatives at a discussion organized by the water resources ministry, which approved the project before sending it for a final review by the National Development and Reform Commission.

Hubei delegates at the meeting said they strongly opposed the project. But Shaanxi representatives want it to move forward.

A major concern in Hubei is the diversion's effects on the biological system, particularly fish. Several experts warned that the diversion will eliminate about 33 percent of the fish species in the Han and cut the total fish population by two-thirds as wintering and feeding grounds dry up and water temperatures fall.

Cao Wenxuan, president of the China Fish Association and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Caixin that figures used by the Hubei experts may not be accurate, and that studies have been inclusive.

At the same time, Cao acknowledged that South-North water diversion project and dams can seriously affect fish and other aquatic life, and he called on the government to organize a systematic study on the impact of the project on the ecosystem.

For example, Cao said the diversion will reduce water temperatures on the lower Han, which in turn will affect fish spawning. Most fish native to the Han spawn in May when waters are at least 18 degrees Celsius. But studies have shown water in the Danjiangkou Reservoir will cool by up to six degrees after the surface level falls to 157 meters, delaying fish spawning by 20 days.

Dams on the Han River are officially being called "fish roads," suggesting these structures have been designed to support aquatic life. For example, the Xinglong Water Conservancy Center said it built fish ladders for migrating herring and eels.

But Cao said the claims are misleading. In reality, herring haven't been seen on the Hubei sections of the Yangtze for some time. And eels don't need ladders, since they typically use locks for migrating.

"Aren't these fish ladders just decorations?" asked Cao.

In Cao's opinion, a lot of ecological evaluations of water diversion and dam projects remain to be done. Studies of Danjiangkou Reservoir and Han River fish primarily rely on data from the 1970s and '80s.

"How many types of fish currently remain is not clear. How many types and how many fish there will be in the future, as well as how many will become extinct, is also not clear," he said. "If we're not clear on this, the destructive impact on fish habitats wrought by these construction projects will be even greater."

Moving Forward

In a variety of public speeches, though, Shaanxi leaders have hailed the project for tapping "the power of the entire province." Indeed, the sources of the Han and its main tributary the Dan River are in Shaanxi's Hanzhong and Ankang regions. Nearly half the river's length is in the province. And of the 38.8 billion cubic meters of water that flow into the upper Danjiangkou Reservoir, nearly 26 billion cubic meters come from Shaanxi.

But all that water is in southern Shaanxi, north of the Qinling Mountains and Guangzhong Plain. Northern and central parts of the province are as dry as the rest of northern China. Moreover the Wei River, the lifeblood of provincial capital Xi'an, is heavily polluted and has occasionally in recent years has run so low that the flow actually stopped.

More than a decade ago, Shaanxi began planning an independent diversion project. It called for digging a 10-kilometer tunnel through the Qinling Mountains to tap the Han for what some said would be about 17 billion yuan.
 But how would a Qingling tunnel – or any other diversion of the Han – affect the river in Hubei Province? At the time, water resource experts across the country said the benefits of the proposed diversion outweighed the negatives for Hubei.

Another view was voiced in a study organized by the Hubei government and conducted by local as well as national experts. Almost all results pointed to negative ecological impacts and positive flood-prevention effects, leading to the conclusion that short-term positives outweighed the negatives, but long-run negatives shadowed positives.

A former chief engineer at the Hubei Academy of Environmental Sciences, Shen Xiaoli, who oversaw research and drafting of the diversion project's environmental impact reports on the middle and lower Han, recalled that the project's disadvantages were indeed recognized even at the highest levels of officialdom.

During a key debate, Shen remembers that "a high-level leader in charge of the (project) recognized Hubei's argument that the negatives outweighed the positives."

Apparently in response to this recognition, the first phase of the what became known as the national diversion project's middle route was reduced from the originally planned 14.5 billion cubic meters to 9.5 billion cubic meters. And the scheduled start of the diversion was postponed to 2014 from 2010.

Hubei's biggest gain during the planning stage was approval for its proposal to use another diversion project to offset the damage caused by the first diversion. This happened in early 2009 when the State Council approved the 800 million yuan Yangtze-Han Water Diversion Project, for which construction got under way several months ago.

The Yangtze-Han project is designed to make up for water taken from Danjiangkou Reservoir and lost to the middle and lower reaches of the Han. Water would be directed from near Jingzhou along the Yangtze through a manmade channel in Qianjiang and into the lower reaches of the Han, adding up to 6 billion cubic meters a year.

In addition to the Yangtze-Han project, Hubei started its Yangtze-Han Supplementation Project to further hedge against the effects of the Han-Wei diversion. It's aimed at funneling 6 billion cubic meters of water from Hubei's Shennong Stream in the Three Gorges Reservoir to the Du River, which feeds into the upper Han.
 
Hubei has started processing paperwork for the project and may be ready to ask for a Ministry of Water Resources review in early 2011. The objective is to win approval at the same time that construction begins for the Han-Wei project. 

Management Soup

Water shortages are an issue for every province involved in the South-North Water Diversion Project, but the monetary value of alleviating these shortages has never been conclusively quantified.

At recent meetings of the National People's Congress and the People's Political Consultative Conference, representatives from Hubei and Shaanxi repeatedly proposed setting water prices. They said that, a half-yuan paid for each ton of water would give them several billion yuan every year for conservation and construction.

Yet although water is increasingly scarce in many areas, the central government traditionally plans water distribution with receivers and providers never once meeting face-to-face. This fact points to the nine-headed-dragon complexity of river management in China.

Theoretically, the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee has jurisdiction over the Han. But it can only manage some projects because local governments also have a degree of authority.

Water pollution issues fall under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, while river shipping is managed by the Ministry of Transport and fishing is the Ministry of Agriculture's area. Maritime security is in the hands of the Ministry of Public Security.

Local environmental groups have also started to make inroads into the complicated process of managing the nation's rivers, including the Han.

One group called Green River Han is based in the Hubei city of Xiangfan. Its vice chairman is 67-year-old Li Zhihe, who remembers a time when the river water tasted sweet.

Li said he's been tasting the Han's water since 1997 to track changes in quality. By 2002, he said, pollution had robbed the river of its sweet flavor.

Now the water "is second-rate, and sometimes third-rate," he said one sunny afternoon on the banks of the Han. "Will future generations dare to drink the river water like me?"

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