Quenching thirst with tourism

It is the largest water diversion project in the world.

It covers the longest distance, benefits the largest population, represents the biggest man-made attempt to offer access to water, and to achieve all this, initiated the most aggressive relocation movement for a single water project in world history.

China's South-to-North Water Diversion project (SNWD), with its east, middle and west routes running 5,599 kilometers, was designed to divert water from southern China's Yangtze River to the Yellow River, the Huaihe River and the Haihe River, whose water beds are slowly running dry.

Some 438 million people now live in this region, where water shortages could not only cause the economy to stagnate, but also bring social unrest.

These pressures are what forced the government to launch this massive diversion project on December 27, 2002.

With a total of $62 billion in investment and 10 years of construction, the central government expects the two routes (the east route, a water way from Jiangsu Province to the Tianjin Municipality, and the middle route, from Hubei Province to Beijing) to quench the thirst of the parched north.

But water alone is insufficient. Tourism, it would seem, is to be the new lifeblood of the area.

On December 19, 2012, a week from the 10th anniversary of the project, the Office of the SNWD Project Commission of the State Council released a new plan that zoned 12 cities along the middle route of the water project as key tourism development areas and vowed to make the middle route an eco-friendly economic zone.

However, there are few details on whether there will be any central government funding. Perhaps more worryingly, the development of tourism looks set to come at a high price, as potentially polluting industries are being restricted for fear of water contamination.

A sacrificial city

One of the tourism sites included is Danjiangkou in Hubei Province.

Sitting on the southern end of the middle route, Danjiangkou is located near the Yangtze River and is home to a giant dam and reservoir that will start providing clean water not only to Beijing but also to Henan and Hebei provinces for irrigation, opening thousands of hectares to agriculture.

More than 160,000 residents were relocated in the 1970s in Danjiangkou for the construction of the dam and more than 100,000 additional residents will be moved during the current phase of the project that is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.

"There are 400,000 people left in the city after a majority of the population were relocated to make space for the water project," Chen Xuwen, deputy director of the tourism bureau of Danjiangkou, told the Global Times, adding that as the starting point of the middle route and the home of water resources, the city has been ordered to halt development of industry and agriculture for fear that fertilizers or chemicals might pollute the water.

After receiving compensation payouts, many left. Those who stayed found themselves struggling in a fractured local economy. Left with no other options, the city government decided to turn to tourism for development.