China Diverting Major River to "Water" Beijing Olympics

Socialism with Chinese Charecteristics :)

Landlocked Beijing has begun tapping a lattice of reservoirs, rivers, and canals across eastern China to provide plentiful water for this summer's Olympic Games.

As part of the initiative, more than 150 million cubic meters (39.6 billion gallons) of water are being diverted from the Yellow River through a network of canals stretching across three provinces to refill a lake south of the historically drought-stricken Chinese capital.

A parallel project is diverting water to the east coast resort of Qingdao, which will host the Olympic sailing competitions.

"Athletes from all over the world will come to China to join the Olympic Games [in August]," said Huang Feng, a researcher at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, which is in charge of the river's diversion.

"So Beijing is implementing its master plan to provide the very highest quality of water."

Only the Beginning

The current rerouting is just the precursor to a 60-billion-U.S.-dollar hydro-engineering project expected to see three human-carved rivers carry water from southern China to the arid north.

The water transfer project is designed to divert more than 40 billion cubic meters (10.5 trillion gallons) of water each year from China's longest river, the Yangtze, and its tributaries.

But observers say the move will likely spark bitter disputes between those losing and gaining access to a precious resource.

Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In 2000 "thousands of farmers in the Yellow River Basin of eastern China clashed with police over a government plan to recapture runoff from a local reservoir for cities, industries, and other users," she noted.

What's more, about 300,000 Chinese are slated for resettlement to make room for new diversion channels.

There is certainly potential for more disputes within China over land, water, and pollution" as the project gains momentum, Postel said.

Historical Water Woes

Bordered by the rapidly expanding Ordos and Gobi deserts, Beijing has been historically plagued by thirst (see map).

The north's Yellow River, a lifeline of Chinese civilization since Neolithic times, has become so overused that it sometimes runs dry before reaching its estuary on the east coast.

In the last 50 years a population explosion, an industrial revolution, the rapid expansion of cities, and the spread of irrigated agriculture have fueled the region's water shortages.

(Read "China's Instant Cities" in National Geographic magazine [June 2007].)

This push for economic growth has devastated China's environment and waterways. The World Health Organization estimates that polluted drinking water kills nearly a hundred thousand Chinese citizens each year.

To help bring more and better quality water into the north in time for the Olympics, the government revived plans first proposed by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1949 to crisscross China with a matrix of human-made waterways.

Yang Xiaoping, a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the project calls for three new waterways to run along the east, center, and far west of the country.

In addition to new construction, the project will incorporate sections of the imperial Grand Canal built during the Sui Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 589 to 618.

The Grand Canal stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) between the southeastern city of Hangzhou and the North China Plain and was built to ferry rice northward from more fertile regions.

Portions of the ancient canal will be modernized and expanded as it is transformed into the world's longest aqueduct, said Huang of the Yellow River Commission.

Ultimately the canal will become part of the project's eastern route, transporting water from the Yangtze through a tunnel burrowed beneath the Yellow River and on to northern China.

The 745-mile-long (1,200-kilometer-long) central route will also be channeled underground as its passes the Yellow River toward Beijing.

Effects Downstream

But the most difficult part of the water diversion project, will likely be the western route, experts say.

This route will transfer water from the upper reaches of the Yangtze into the upper reaches of the Yellow River—a plan that depends on a series of canals and tunnels being carved along one edge of the Tibetan Plateau in western China.

James Nickum, a professor at Tokyo Jogakkan College, recently conducted a study of the diversion project for the United Nations Development Programme.

"The very expensive and technically challenging western route involves working on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—3,000 to 5,000 meters [9,800 to 16,400 feet] above sea level—and overcoming some major engineering and climatic challenges," Nickum said.

For one thing, the route would require tunnels to be chiseled through the earthquake-prone Bayankala Mountains, Nickum said.

Chen Xiqing, an expert on hydrology at Hohai University in Nanjing, said China's increasing openness—fueled by the country's Internet revolution—could also make this section problematic.

"As an environmental coalition becomes stronger in China, it is putting more pressure on the government and pushing for more citizen participation in environmental problem-solving," Chen said.

"My guess is that this western route will become more and more difficult to complete as people have more freedom to speak out on water rights, the environment, and local ecosystems."

And conflicts over China's hydro-engineering projects in Tibet could spill across borders.

Aaron Wolf, professor of geography at Oregon State University, said that "all of the countries in Asia downstream of rivers originating in Tibet are wary of China's water development plans."

Tibet's Yarlung Zangbo River becomes the Brahmaputra when it enters India, while its Lancang River feeds into the Mekong, which flows through Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, predicts that conflicts over water could ricochet across Asia.

"By 2015 nearly three billion people—40 percent of the projected world population—are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize enough water to satisfy the food, industrial, and domestic needs of their citizens," she said.

"This scarcity will translate into heightened competition for water between cities and farms, between neighboring states and provinces, and at times between nations."

President Hu Jintao: Cultural Revolution was 10 Years of Rebellion

“The Cultural Revolution was a ten-year-long rebellious movement against the government that inflicted serious harm on the party, the nation and the people,” said Chinese President Hu Jintao in a recent sharply-worded denouncement of the Cultural Revolution.

The fourth generation of Chinese leadership led by Hu has made a revised assessment of the Cultural Revolution compared to earlier leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. The reason behind Hu’s recent shift on the Cultural Revolution is said to be to check those opposing reform and to make public the party’s position on increasing social problems, like the inequality in development during the past 30 years.

○ “The Cultural Revolution was a rebellious movement”

Hu’s criticism of the Cultural Revolution first appeared in a speech addressed to the Chinese Communist Party Central School on December 17 last year. Hu made the address prior to the opening of a session discussing new leading members for the central committee and candidates of the 17th National People’s Congress.

The change in Hu’s stance is a notable departure from the position his generation of leaders has held thus far. Unlike the second and third generation leadership who completely denied the Cultural Revolution all together, the fourth generation leadership has maintained the position that “the Cultural Revolution is different from Maoism as it is not based on Marxist-Leninism or Maoism.”

China is undergoing numerous social challenges that its market economy has brought with it, like the income gap, unemployment, housing shortages, an inadequate health care system and educational deficiencies. China’s leadership hopes to overcome those challenges by focusing more on Maoism than their predecessors have done and are trying to draw a line between Maoism and the Cultural Revolution while maintaining a flexible attitude toward the revolution.

Last May around the time of the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, various opinions on the revolution were expressed. Yet, the fourth generation leadership led by Hu were ambiguous about the revolution by not endorsing any of the opinions. Instead, the leadership banned any open discussions or publications concerning the revolution.

○ Continuing reforms; Maintaining Chinese socialism

Hu stressed that, while criticizing the Cultural Revolution, China will adhere to reforms while firmly maintaining Chinese socialism. “The Cultural Revolution widened the production gap between China and the world,” Hu said. “Reform and opening is the only way to catch up with the world.”

Reform and opening is thus the only way to increase China’s production capability, to raise the living standard of the Chinese people, and to spur the modernization of the country. This is the only way for the Party to remain ahead of the new era.

“The initiation of reforms and opening does not mean the end of socialism. With reforms and opening well in place, China will continue to adhere to Chinese socialism which will ensure the country eliminates unhealthy social trends under the leadership of Chinese Communist party.”

○ Behind the sudden change

It is said that behind Hu’s recent criticism lies a growing opposition force demanding democracy and criticizing the success of current policies.

Some senior members of the party were said to demand the return to the pre-reform era, citing the increasing income gap, rising unemployment rate and housing shortage as key reasons. This is a demand that is clearly beyond what the current leadership can accept.

The secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’

The secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’
The terrible secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’
Aidan Hartley
Wednesday, 10th October 2007

The author’s arrest while investigating Chinese prisons

A crowd of faeces-stained, starving figures with haunted eyes stared at us from behind the bars. Some looked cold and wet, as if they had been hosed down with water. Most of them were old, and some handicapped. They began wailing and pleading with us. ‘Let us out!’ they sobbed. ‘This is a prison!’ They showed us one ragged woman. ‘Look at this. She was beaten!’ They carried another elderly woman towards the bars who appeared to be paralysed. Guarding the inmates were young men in black jumpsuits. I knew they would stop us filming any second now, but at first the guards reacted slowly. ‘Those are the thugs that beat us!’ yelled one of the inmates, pointing. ‘They strangled and beat me!’

‘I’ve been held here for 14 days!’ an old man hobbling on a walking stick said to me. ‘In one room there are about 20 to 30 people. The conditions are awful.’

I was with a film crew making a documentary for Channel 4. We were inside one of Beijing’s secret ‘black jails’, where the poor and destitute are held without trial or charge. Officially these jails do not exist, since arbitrary arrest and detention are against Chinese law. But in fact there are many of them, and they exist with the full knowledge and backing of the government. My colleagues and I were the first Western TV crew to enter a black jail, and we paid for our temerity: we were assaulted, our camera was smashed, and we were arrested and detained.

The black jails are where ‘petitioners’ end up. There are thousands of petitioners in Beijing, poor Chinese from the provinces who have flooded into the city to seek the help of state officials in settling their grievances — something they have a legal right to do — but who are branded as ‘troublemakers’ by the authorities. The sole reason for locking them up seems to be that they are an eyesore, and spoil Beijing’s image as a modern, harmonious city. That image has never been more important: next week is the Communist Party Congress and next year the city hosts the 2008 Olympic Games.

In Beijing last month we found these petitioners living like tramps, sleeping rough in underpasses. Among them were peasants evicted from farms, elderly men with goatee beards trying to clear their names after jail sentences as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ during Mao’s reign of terror, mothers trying to have their children’s murders or rapes investigated by lazy, corrupt officials. We even met a disabled ex-military serviceman who had been deployed among the forces that suppressed protests in the Tiananmen bloodbath.

The prisoners in the black jail we visited were from Nanyang City in Henan province. As we spoke to the inmates and the guards, a black-shirted goon came storming towards us shouting his head off. In unison the inmates pointed and screamed, ‘He’s the director!’ They wept and grimaced. ‘He’s the one who runs this place!’ Black Shirt went nuts. ‘Don’t film!’ he shouted. ‘This is illegal!’

Suddenly a dozen snarling guards in jumpsuits surrounded us. I tried reasoning with them. ‘Be polite,’ I said — to no avail. They shoved us away from the jail gates. Black Shirt tried to rip the camera out of my cameraman Andrew’s hands. In the tussle, the guards smashed it. Outside, we jumped into the taxi that had driven us to the jail — amazingly it was still waiting for us — and tried to drive off.

Black Shirt ordered the entrance gates to be slammed shut, blocking our way. We were dragged out across the tarmac. In the mêlée I said to Andrew, ‘Quick, give me the tape.’ He removed it from the camera and I stuck it in my sock while Andrew put another blank roll into his dead machine.

Just when the goons had apparently decided to give us a beating, the police turned up and arrested us. So much for Beijing’s promise that in the run-up to the Olympic Games ‘there will be no restrictions on media reporting and movement of journalists’. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Beijing the 2008 Games, China promised it would improve its appalling human rights record. But there is no sign of improvement. Human rights, and human beings, are being brushed aside in the ruthless preparations for the Games.