China’s worst drought in fifty years has forced Chinese leaders to defend their record of building vast hydro-engineering works at a time when the country’s finite water resources are increasingly depleted by population growth and rapid economic development. Authorities have vehemently denied that continuous drought and shortage of drinking water in southwest China, which has affected the lives of 17 million people, are somehow related to the completion this year of the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest dam straddling the Yangtze River.

“The record-low water levels in some parts of Yangtze and its tributaries and the drought are not directly related to the Three Gorges Dam,” Hu Jiajun, spokesperson for the Yangtze Water Conservancy Committee said at a press conference this week. “The dam can only store as much water as is brought by the river.” Officials blamed the adverse climate for the unprecedented drought afflicting Sichuan province and the municipality of Chongqing. “The abnormalities are caused by global warming and the overall change in the world’s climate,” said Dong Wenjie, director of the National Weather Forecast Centre. “It has nothing to do with the completion and operation of the Three Gorges Dam.” Planned and built amid nationwide controversy, the dam is cast by Chinese communist leaders as a major engineering feat that would tame the waters of the mighty Yangtze and bring prosperity to an area long plagued by devastating floods.

But the month-long droughts in the Yangtze basin this summer have spurred speculations that the massive dam has upset the natural balance. Opponents of the project have long asserted that the dam will have untold ecological effects, changing the climate of the entire region. Drought has affected also the flow of the Mekong River, or Lancang, as it is known in Chinese, where Chinese authorities have diverted water to build the Manwan and Dachaoshan dams, and are considering a series of new reservoirs.

In July, Chinese engineers completed a critical section of the “South-North Water Transfer Project” — the biggest water scheme in the country’s history that will cost more than $25 billion and take some 50 years to complete. They finished two tunnels in the central China’s Hebei province, which form the backbone of the Central route, carrying water from the Yangtze River up north to Beijing. The Central route is being given priority because of worries that Beijing may run short of water for the 2008 Olympic Games. Two-thirds of China’s roughly 600 cities suffer water shortages, while in Beijing and some 100 other cities there are serious shortfalls.

The “South-North Water Transfer Project” though, is expected to go ahead as planned. Officials point out that North China has 58 per cent of the cultivated land and 45 per cent of the country’s population but only 19 per cent of the country’s water resources. All over northern China, rivers now run dry in their low reaches for much of the year. In 1997, the Yellow River, once known as ‘China’s Sorrow’ for its ability to inflict destruction with its flood-swollen waters, ran dry for 226 days. This year, despite the unusually heavy rains, the northern plains have continued to suffer from drought and the underground tables have been rapidly sinking. — IPS