The shortage of water has reached crisis levels in many regions of China as waste and pollution become increasingly serious.
(Ecns.cn)—It is a sleepless night for Liu Gensheng, a farmer from Huining County of Northwest China's Gansu Province, who is staying in a hotel in Beijing.
What keeps him awake is not the uncomfortable hotel bed, but the running water and flushing toilet he hears next door. "How can they waste water like that?" he wonders aloud.
"Huining's water is more valuable than gold" is a popular saying in Liu's impoverished and arid hometown, where people get only half a bucket of water each day and yearly average precipitation is 340 millimeters.
Liu is loath to use the faucet in his room – he asks a girl working at the front desk for a basin to wash his face in, but the girl, with a surprised look on her face, says they do not have one.
Chinese water use has surged with the growing number of factories and power plants, as well as with personal consumption. More Chinese can now afford piped water, private bathrooms, washing machines, homes with gardens, cars that need washing and of course more food, which needs water for growing. Increased wealth has also led to a growing number of thirsty golf courses, and even ski resorts that use man-made snow.
A very dry place
The crisis has become part of daily life for some people in arid Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province.
Taking a shower can be a luxury for village residents in these regions, said Professor Wang Hao, from the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), during an interview on China Central Television's (CCTV) Dialogue earlier this month.
In the past 20 years, Wang has been to almost every spot where drought has become a constant condition, searching for the solution to the water shortage in China.
To emphasize how scarce water can be in these regions, Wang spoke about a place he visited in 1996.
The village's name was Huanjiaoshui, which literally means "call for water." There, a water cellar was kept in every residence to store rainwater for daily usage. Only, with such little precipitation, the cellars could not store enough, forcing residents to rely on water-trucks sent by the local government.
"Sparrows, a usually shy and timid bird, flew to those trucks and unscrupulously 'fought' for water with humans," Wang recalled. "Most people living in the dry areas only take three baths in their entire lives: when they are born, when they get married and when they die."
Although Liu Gensheng was up all night because of the running water in the next room, Beijing is also drying up. The provincial bureau of water resources in North China's Hebei Province opened a reservoir last Thursday to send 120 million cubic meters of water to the thirsty capital.
With Beijing's permanent population approaching 20 million, the city's water crisis has become aggravated. Official figures suggest that the city's per capita water resource availability has dropped to 100 cubic meters a year, or one-tenth of the United Nations' "danger threshold."
Last week's diversion was the third time Beijing has received water from the reservoir. The capital city received 435 million cubic meters of water during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, accounting for 65 percent of the city's water consumption during the event.
The truth is that the water problem has now reached a crisis level, as many northern cities, including Beijing and Tianjin, face chronic shortages, and more than 40 percent of China's population is concentrated in its relatively dry north.
To solve the crisis, China launched the South-North Water Diversion Project in 2002, building 1,400-km-long canals in the western, central and eastern parts of China so that water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River will be diverted north, where water supply is inadequate. The project is slated for completion in 2014.
