On a cloudy September day in the humid central Chinese city of Jingzhou, a group of Chinese officials quietly inaugurated a new canal designed to address a growing water shortage in an area normally plagued by flooding.
The “Bringing the Yangtze to help the Han River” canal project is needed because of a much larger project, 250km to the north, that cuts the flow of the Han, a Yangtze tributary. About a quarter of the water in the Han will be reallocated to arid northern China in a $60bn engineering effort that critics say will create shortages in the south.
Water from the middle leg of the south-north diversion project officially begins flowing this month, a moment that will probably be marked with much greater ceremony. The project, inspired by an offhand remark by Mao Zedong that the north should borrow water from the south, is designed to alleviate chronic water shortages in the industrial north and bring additional supply to growing cities such as Beijing and Tianjin.