“Is Northern China Really Short of Water?” An Argument Breaks Out — and What Kind of Question Is This, Really?

Water stress is real. But a “water crisis” has to be looked at from several angles — whatever the definition, it never means that only running out of water counts as a crisis.

In May, on the website of chinadialogue, an NGO that covers China’s environmental problems, an argument broke out over whether China is facing a “water crisis.” It pushed a question that has drawn attention many times before back in front of everyone.

The argument was set off by Charlie Parton, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) — a British defense and security think tank founded in 1831 — and special adviser on China to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Of his 37-year diplomatic career, 22 years were spent working in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Before retiring in 2016, he was a counsellor at the EU Delegation to China. On May 9 he published a report on chinadialogue, “Can China Win Its Looming Water Crisis?”, setting out his reasons for believing China faces a “water crisis.” Two days later, chinadialogue ran a rebuttal, “Re-evaluating China’s ‘Water Crisis’”, written by Sarah Rogers, a geographer and research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, together with three colleagues. On May 25, Parton published a rebuttal to the rebuttal.

How “Northern China Is Short of Water” Got Defined

Parton’s reasons for saying China faces a “water crisis” — one that shows up in the north first — come from numbers.

China’s per capita water resources are already low, below the internationally recognized “stress” line of 1,700 cubic meters: just 1,028 cubic meters in 2016. And since 80% of China’s water is in the south, the per capita figure in the north is lower still. Four provinces broadly counted as “northern” — Gansu, Shaanxi, Liaoning, and Jiangsu — have between 500 and 1,000 cubic meters per person, which counts as “shortage.” Eight more — Tianjin, Ningxia, Beijing, Shandong, Shanghai, Hebei, Henan, and Shanxi — are below 500 cubic meters, which counts as “severe shortage.” Among them, the report notes, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region sits at only half the “severe shortage” level — “not much better than Saudi Arabia.”

That still isn’t the whole problem. The report also points out that those 12 water-short and severely water-short provinces hold 41% of the country’s population and produce 38% of its agricultural output, 50% of its electricity, and 46% of its industrial output — all heavy water users. On top of that, 85% of China’s coal sits in these dry provinces, and coal mining drinks water too. Which means a water shortage would do serious damage to the Chinese economy.

The shortage, Parton argues, is not a passing climate problem and does not come from “drought.” It comes from a resource base that has been wrecked.

In 2015, the report notes, the water development rates of the north’s three big rivers — the Hai, the Yellow, and the Liao — reached 106%, 83%, and 76% respectively. (The development rate is water used as a share of the water available.) That is far past the internationally recognized safe line of 40%. The Yellow River’s flow, for one, is now only 10% of what it was in the 1940s, and most of its tributaries have been dry for long stretches for years. According to a Ministry of Environmental Protection official in 2015, 28,000 rivers disappeared in China over the previous 20 years. With so little surface water, the north leans hard on groundwater, and groundwater levels are dropping fast — 1 to 3 meters a year. Beijing’s groundwater level has fallen 100 to 300 meters since the 1970s. It may never come back up, because a falling water table collapses the aquifer, and that cannot be reversed. So cities’ future ability to hold water gets worse too.

Pollution looks just as hard to undo. In 2015, 8.3% of monitored waters were rated worse than Grade V. Another figure: in 2014, 61.5% of China’s groundwater was rated Grade IV or V pollution. These numbers matter especially because water too polluted to use is still counted inside the already tight total of “water resources.”

What turns this predicament into what Parton calls a “crisis” is that none of the remedies seem to help. Seawater desalination, the fix people reach for whenever fresh water runs short, is hemmed in by energy. Reverse osmosis and distillation both need electricity, and piping the water from the coast inland needs electricity as well. From the report: “Desalinating one cubic meter of seawater and moving it from the coast inland requires generating electricity that itself consumes 0.5 cubic meters of water.”

Worse, the South-North Water Transfer Project, the object of so much hope, may not help either. The report notes that even if the project’s eastern and central routes hit their 2030 design volume of 20.9 billion cubic meters, and all of that water went to Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, it would lift the region only to two-thirds of the 500-cubic-meter “severe shortage” line. In fact Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei has to share that water with Shandong, Jiangsu, and Henan. So, Parton concludes, “this project only delays the moment the crisis arrives.”

Under those conditions, he argues, a serious drought would drain China’s water ahead of schedule — and the economy would collapse.

The Argument That Followed: A Population Problem, or a Pollution Problem?

Next to Parton’s heavily sourced report, the rebuttal from Rogers’s team looks a bit hasty. The 2,000-word piece rests on a research project Rogers runs with eight colleagues, “The Technopolitics of China’s South-North Water Transfer Project”. What they found: “China’s economic development is not currently threatened by water supply shortages, and is unlikely to be threatened in the near future.”

Their core objection is that the yardstick Parton uses to measure China’s shortage is faulty. The three-step split at 1,700, 1,000, and 500 cubic meters into “stress,” “shortage,” and “severe shortage” comes from the Falkenmark Water Stress Indicator, and Rogers’s team argues that Parton applied this very crude measure without questioning it. For one thing, an indicator of fresh water per person says nothing about how much water people actually need. Chinese demand, they argue, is markedly lower than that of city dwellers in developed countries: people live in apartment blocks, have no gardens to water, and many rural residents have no flush toilet. One study found that Beijing residents use 50% to 75% less water a year than residents of Melbourne. The Falkenmark index also ignores wastewater recycling, which is exactly what Beijing does well — a quarter of its water is recycled, so much so that the water table has started rising again.

“This crisis may be overstated,” the article says. “On the whole, what North China needs is not more water but better management of the water it has, including stronger pollution control and higher water-use efficiency. There are signs of progress on both.”

They argue that “contract-based water conservation management” and the China Water Rights Exchange, both launched in 2016, show the government starting to build incentives for using water better. Beyond that, the “Three Red Lines” (the 2012 Opinions on Implementing the Strictest Water Resources Management System), the “Ten Measures for Water” (the 2015 Water Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan), the river chief system, the State Council’s 2014 announcement of 2 trillion yuan for pollution control, and the 2018 overhaul of administrative bodies all give “reason for optimism about China’s ability to deal with its water pollution problem.”

As a team that studies the South-North Water Transfer Project, they believe the project — along with the hundreds of smaller works under construction linking one river system to another, plus water-rights trading — is unrolling a flexible “national water supply network” that can move water where it is needed. With it, “water supply will not become a major constraint on China’s development.”

To push the case further, the article also reasons backward from what the government does to what the water situation must be. If water were short, it says, Beijing would not spend more than a billion cubic meters a year watering parks and green space, and the central government would not have dared announce the building of the Xiong’an New Area. Xiong’an has the backing of the central route of the South-North Water Transfer Project, and also draws Yellow River water to top up Baiyangdian Lake.

Parton was not persuaded. In his “rebuttal to the rebuttal,” published on May 29, he granted that the Falkenmark index has its limits, but argued that even allowing for differences in demand, North China’s water per person is still far below developed countries — Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei has twice the population of Britain, France, and Italy combined, and 10% of Britain’s water. He also faulted Rogers’s team for dwelling on potable water, which is only 14% of all water resources: even if Chinese people use less of it than people in developed countries, that saves very little. The real heavy users — agriculture, industry, and power generation — are where the problem lies.

Parton’s own report mentions the water lost to pollution, but he does not accept Rogers’s team’s line that “China’s water problem is largely caused by widespread water pollution,” because by China’s own official data only 8.3% of monitored waters are too polluted to use. Even a successful cleanup, then, would not add much water. What he did not take up is the figure that “61.5% of China’s groundwater was rated Grade IV or V pollution in 2014” — which looks like a great deal of water. One possible reason: groundwater pollution is extremely hard to clean up, perhaps impossible, so there is nothing to discuss.

Contrary to what Rogers’s team said, the Beijing Municipal Water Authority source he cites states only that the water table is falling more slowly, and that it will not start rising again until 2025. As for the weight Rogers puts on Beijing and Xiong’an, Parton argues that both are special cases and neither stands in for North China.

Can Distant Water Quench a Present Thirst?

The deepest disagreement between the two sides is over what the South-North Water Transfer Project and a “national water grid” can actually do about China’s shortage.

Parton argues that talking about a national water grid in a country as vast and as physically complicated as China is too much like the old man who tried to move the mountains. There is some drama here: he dug up a 2015 paper Rogers wrote with four members of that same “Technopolitics of China’s South-North Water Transfer Project” team, which says: “The volume of water moved by the existing route of the South-North Water Transfer Project must be reduced, and plans to expand the project further must be shelved. As its limits become clear, the South-North Water Transfer Project is likely to become the biggest failure of China’s attempt to solve its water problems with mega-engineering.” QDaily notes that the paper’s abstract also says: “Better local water management, rather than pumping water across national boundaries, is the right way to meet growing water demand.”

Why did doubt 30 months ago turn into optimism now? That was Parton’s new question.

Arguments over the South-North Water Transfer Project have in fact never stopped, and some of the doubts come from senior officials.

In 2014, Qiu Baoxing, a former vice minister of housing and urban-rural development, published a paper in the journal Water & Wastewater Engineering, “The State of Urban Water Security in China and What to Do About It”, arguing that “transferred water” schemes — diverting the Yellow River to Qingdao, the Han River to the Wei River, the South-North Water Transfer Project — have run into trouble. They damage the ecology of the places the water leaves, and because transferred water differs in composition from local water, scale builds up inside tap-water pipes, which is quite hard to fix. Treating pollution, restoring water ecosystems, and using water more efficiently, he argued, is the right way to secure water.

In 2015, a joint study by four universities in China, the United States, and Britain was said to be the first full analysis of both the “physical water transfer” China achieved through hydraulic engineering before 2007 and the “virtual water transfer” achieved through trade in water-hungry goods. Neither, it found, played a major part in easing water stress where the water arrived, while both made water stress worse where it came from. Looking ahead, the study calculated that by 2030 the water stress index of Hubei, a source province for the South-North Water Transfer Project, would go from “moderate” to “severe,” while Jiangsu, another source province already at the “extreme” level, would get worse still. “Extreme water stress” means a province already uses more water in a year than its fresh water renews in a year, so its stock keeps falling. To ease water stress, the team concluded, China should put its attention on managing demand and raising efficiency rather than on continuing to alter supply.

In 2009, Liu Changming — an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a hydrologist, and director of the academy’s Joint Research Center for Water Problems — was optimistic about the South-North Water Transfer Project in an interview with Science Times. He said: “Although Beijing still overdraws 300 to 400 million cubic meters of groundwater a year to keep its supply stable, this will be resolved once water from the central route arrives in 2014.”

By 2014, things had changed. In another interview that year he said that a 2011 survey of the Han River source area found the water volume there had fallen by 7.18 billion cubic meters over the decade from 2000 to 2010, which could make the 9.5 billion cubic meters the central route’s first phase was designed to move “a bit tight.”

Besides Moving Water, What Else Can Be Done?

Asked by a reporter in 2009 whether China’s water could support continued economic and social development, Liu Changming said he was optimistic.

Part of the reason lies in what he means by “water resources.” The usual definition is surface water plus groundwater, but Liu argues that rainwater belongs in the count too: China’s annual precipitation is more than ten times the water it uses in a year. Turn enough of that rain into groundwater and the resource base grows enormously.

He also believes China still has huge room to save water: agriculture could cut 30%; industry could raise its water reuse rate from 60% to 80%; and by stopping waste and pipe leaks and by recycling and treating wastewater, urban household use could be cut by another half to a third.

Parton grants that the institutions the Chinese government has built in recent years to ease the shortage do some good — the “Three Red Lines,” the “Ten Measures for Water,” the Environmental Protection Law, the river chief and lake chief systems, “sponge cities,” wastewater recycling. It is just that none of it is enough.

To deal with what he calls the “water crisis,” he argues, China has to remake its economy. In an article he wrote for the Financial Times in February, he called it turning into a “camel economy.”

That means: industry should replace steel, aluminum, garments, papermaking and other energy- and water-hungry sectors with high technology and services as fast as it can. Power supply should first cut demand, and make full use of non-fossil energy. Agriculture has to give up the politically delicate insistence on feeding the country from its own fields and import more farm products instead — because importing farm products, especially thirsty ones, amounts to importing large volumes of water. Irrigation should also waste less, since inefficient irrigation squanders 30% of China’s water. He even suggests land reform to consolidate farmland into larger holdings — a topic no less politically delicate — without explaining why saving water requires big farms.

Another problem, in Parton’s view, is that water in China is simply far too cheap. That is the main obstacle to using it better: in 2011 Chinese water prices were less than a quarter of the world average, while water use per unit of output was several times the developed-country average. But because the price touches unemployment and inflation, and so social stability, the government has left it alone for years.

The “Chinese Water Crisis” Has Been Talked About for Years

Discussion of China’s “water crisis” has come around many times before. A few landmark texts clearly helped shape how the argument is made.

As early as 1999, the veteran environmentalist Ma Jun published China’s Water Crisis, arguing that China has tried to manage water through hydraulic engineering alone while neglecting the ecology of its river basins: 80,000 dams built in 50 years, vast forests gone in the same period, and floods and droughts one after another. Unless the northwest and the north changed ways of producing and living that consume enormous amounts of water, he wrote, even the then much-discussed plans to divert the Yarlung Tsangpo, the Nu, the Lancang, and the Yangtze into the Yellow River would come to nothing. Ma argued back then that switching from engineering-led water management to ecology-led water management was the only way out of China’s water problems. In 2004 the book was translated into English.

In 2005, Wang Shucheng, then minister of water resources, told reporters: “The challenge China faces is to cherish every drop of water, or perish.” Foreign media discussing the “Chinese water crisis” quoted the line widely afterwards, and Charlie Parton’s report opens with it too.

In early 2009 the World Bank released a report in Beijing, “Addressing China’s Water Scarcity: Recommendations for Selected Water Resource Management Issues”, noting that China’s “annual water resources per capita are only a quarter of the world average, among the lowest in the world,” while the dry north has just 757 cubic meters per person, one-eleventh of the world average and below the 1,000-cubic-meter “shortage” threshold. The report cited a figure from another World Bank study: the economic losses from China’s water crisis already come to about 2.3% of GDP.

In 2010 a report from the World Bank-affiliated 2030 Water Resources Group predicted that China would be short 199 billion cubic meters of water in 2030 — 24.3% of the 818 billion cubic meters the country would demand that year. China Daily called that a “water crisis” at the time.

In 2012, a security risk report from the US government predicted that water shortages would leave China with large-scale food shortfalls by 2030, making it a regional security risk.

Plenty of English-language reports and commentaries have used the phrase “China’s water crisis” as well.

But “crisis” is not an objective, scientific concept. It depends on what people perceive and how they feel about it, and on how much hardship they can tolerate and adapt to.

In that 2009 Science Times interview, Liu Changming treated China’s widespread water pollution — along with groundwater overdraft and the land subsidence and vanishing wetlands that come with it — as water crises, plural. Talking about a crisis, in other words, does not require waiting until there is not enough water to go around.

On chinadialogue, after Parton and Rogers’s team had traded articles, Wang Jiao, a research fellow at the Washington-based think tank World Resources Institute, joined the discussion on June 6. Her piece, “Water Stress: Another Way of Looking at China’s Water Crisis”, does not enter the “is there a water crisis or not” argument at all. It looks instead at what the data say about how water stress has shifted from region to region.

Where the Falkenmark index sums up a country or a province with one “per capita” number, Wang’s research uses fuller, more detailed data to show how water stress is really spread across space, in all its complexity.

Comparing basin-by-basin water stress data for 2001, 2010, and 2015, she found that the area of China under high water stress kept growing between 2010 and 2015, but grew more slowly than it had between 2001 and 2010. Over those five years, the total area where water stress got worse was only 35% of the area in the preceding decade.

If “getting worse more slowly” still feels like mixed news, this sounds more like good news: between 2010 and 2015, the total area where water stress eased was ten times the total for 2001-2010.

The contrast between regions remains sharp, though. Compared with the previous decade, water stress in these later five years eased on the upper Yellow River and the upper Yangtze, and got worse on the lower Yellow River. The North China Plain, meanwhile, stayed under extremely high water stress across all 15 years: farm irrigation kept using less water, but industry kept using more.

Nationally, Wang still reads these changes as positive, evidence that the management measures introduced since the State Council’s strictest-ever water management system of 2012, the “Three Red Lines,” are beginning to work. The “Three Red Lines” set floors for the country’s total water use, its water-use efficiency, and its control of pollutants by 2030.

Worth noting: in 2015 another World Resources Institute team published a ranking of the countries facing the most water stress in 2040. The top 33 were mostly in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa; China was not among them. But the report also noted that by then China, along with the United States and India, would face sustained high water stress.

Cover image by Petar Petkovski on Unsplash and Ezra Comeau-Jeffrey on Unsplash