The easternmost leg of the South-North Water Transfer Project began operations June 10. This enormous engineering undertaking will eventually divert up to 44.8 billion cubic meters of Yangtze River water — about 10 percent of the river's annual flow and more than 170 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles yearly — to the water-scarce North China Plain. The project reflects the Communist Party's heightened fear that a lack of water resources in northern China could constrict both short- and long-term economic growth in some of the country's most densely populated and industrially significant provinces.
The eastern route of the project runs from Jiangsu through Shandong and Hebei. The middle route, which runs from Hubei province through Henan and Hebei to Beijing, is due to be completed by 2014. This route, more than its eastern counterpart, has raised concerns over its impact on communities that rely on the Han River, one of the Yangtze's major tributaries and an important source of water for farming in the northern Hubei and southern Shaanxi provinces. The more technically challenging and politically controversial western route, which will link the Yellow and Yangtze rivers nearer to their sources on the Tibetan Plateau, has yet to begin construction. According to some reports, it may not be completed until 2050, if ever.
The South-North Water Transfer Project reinforces the geopolitical significance of the Yangtze River not only as a key transport throughput linking central and coastal Chinese provinces, but also as the economic and social foundation — through the transport of water — of northern China's industrial and agricultural heartlands. Still, questions remain about the long-term environmental and social consequences for much of rural central China and for the rice-farming regions south of the Yangtze, which rely heavily on rainfall from the river's wider watershed.
