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Hung out to dry

In the bone-dry heat of a spring afternoon in northern China, dust clouds swirl over a parched landscape. Trucks trundle across bridges that span a giant concrete ravine stretching like a scar through the arid countryside.

On the floor of the ravine, which yawns 100 metres from side to side, workers are removing plastic sheeting. It's the end of a year of hard labour, driven by the dictates of the Olympic Games. Shimmering in the afternoon sun, the epic construction looks more like something from ancient Egypt than modern China.

The ravine is in fact a canal that carves through 300km of farmland, from the reservoirs of central China to Beijing. Within weeks, the waterway - part of a mammoth scheme being built to take fresh water from southern rivers to the arid north of the country - will be carrying millions of litres of a commodity that is becoming dangerously scarce and precious.

For the farming families watching from the edge of the new canal in Tianjianzhuang, near Baoding city, Hebei province, the waterway will be a cruel mirage. Their ears will be filled with the sound of gushing water as they struggle to eke a living out of the unyielding soil around them.

Water is already so scarce that they can only grow wheat. Here, however, villagers have been lucky in that they have been allowed to stay in their homes, which are hundreds of metres from the canal. Some 30,000 others along the route in the Baoding area have lost homes and land to the project.

As in much of northern China, water in Hebei is becoming ever more scarce as industrialisation, hungry power stations and expanding cities suck up resources, further lowering the water tables. Years of below-average rainfall have helped bring the nation to the brink of what many environmentalists believe could become a crisis.

Nowhere are the ironies of the water shortage more sharply illustrated than here, where the giant canal will suck water from four reservoirs and the Yellow River and send it roaring past barren fields and rural communities whose residents have to dig down 50 metres or more to pump water from dwindling underground streams.

'Every drop of the water will go straight to Beijing,' says farmer Zhao Jian, 49, as he gazes down at the canal. 'Who would believe they could need so much water? We have to irrigate these fields to produce crops, so surely our need is greater than the people living in the city - but we won't be getting any of it.'

WITH STADIUM GRASS to water, millions of visitors and athletes to cater for and a number of polluted waterways and dried-up riverbeds to be flushed out to make the capital look its best for the August games, water consumption in Beijing is expected to rise by more than 30 per cent over the coming months.

The games are being promoted as the Green Olympics; the official website uses the symbol of a large tree reaching to the sky to represent 'harmony and unity between human beings and nature'. However, the massive water diversion is raising questions about the long-term effects on China's rural areas. Is the countryside paying too high a price for the beautification of Beijing?

Environmentalist Dai Qing, a long-term critic of China's policy on water issues, believes it is. 'We have been warning the authorities about the environmental impact from the moment they were awarded the Olympic Games, but they have completely ignored us,' she says.

'Now it seems the weather gods are against China hosting the Olympics. Rainfall has halved since Beijing was awarded the games, from 600mm to 300mm a year, and this is only going to make the problem far worse.'

National rainfall levels have been below average every year since 1999. As a result, water resources per person are now less than 25 per cent of the global average, lower even than in Israel.

Dai says a lack of development control has exacerbated the problem, leading to an incredibly thirsty capital with a rising number of golf courses, artificial lakes and luxury housing developments, all of which consume water at an alarming rate.

Beijing authorities have reacted to the shortage in the short term by tapping underground reservoirs to bolster supplies, but the capital's water table has already fallen by 23 metres in the past half-century.

'A large amount of Beijing's water now comes from these underground sources, which is very worrying - although it is impossible to get accurate data from officials,' says Dai. 'The Olympics are only going to compound this problem. The softball stadium alone is going to need 100,000 cubic metres of water.'

As Dai sees it, the problem comes down to a combination of hubris and misplaced national priorities. 'I can understand that the authorities are eager to show China is no longer the backward country it was - but they are showing the world an artificial face by putting all these resources into the Olympics when most of the country is still so very poor.'

One hundred and sixty kilometres north of Beijing lies the vast Miyun Reservoir; so huge is it that a decade ago no one could have imagined it failing to provide enough water for the capital. In recent years, the brown banks of previously submerged islands in the reservoir have become exposed. With a potential capacity of 4 billion cubic metres, the reservoir is now only 25 per cent full. In fact, Beijing's reservoirs are currently holding less than 15 per cent of their capacity.

As he rows out into the reservoir, fisherman Zhang Tao, 40, says, 'The water level has gone down by about five metres in the past decade. It used to reach right up to the tree line but now the islands in the reservoir are gradually linking up. The government tells us it is conserving water to keep the levels up but we can see the water line is falling lower and lower.'

This summer will be a particularly testing one for the capital's main reservoir. Millions of litres are being diverted from Miyun to feed the Chaobai River, in Beijing's Shunyi district, where the Olympic rowing events are going to be held.

In some rural areas surrounding Beijing, farmers have been ordered to grow wheat and corn instead of more lucrative rice and vegetable crops to help conserve water supplies. Water, meanwhile, is being rationed in drought-hit northeastern provinces and water tables across northern China are falling at the rate of around one metre per year.

China's official news agency, Xinhua, admitted in a recent report that 44 per cent of farmland in northeastern Jilin province - or 1.89 million hectares - had been affected by the drought while annual rainfall in Liaoning province has dropped by more than 75 per cent year on year.

An estimated 400 of China's 600 cities suffer from water shortages and the World Bank has warned that scarcity of resources could ultimately lead to a conflict between cities, industrial interests and the countryside - a prospect that should be particularly worrying for the Communist Party, which sees rural uprisings as the biggest single threat to its grip on power. Earlier this year, in an unusually blunt warning, a senior party official in Shaanxi province, An Qiyuan, said diverting precious water supplies from needy rural areas for the Olympics could cause major environmental, social and economic unrest.

Some experts fear the lasting environmental legacy of the Beijing Olympics will be an even more impoverished rural population left standing in the dust, literally, as China's economic miracle thunders on.

BEIJING ONLY HAS TO look north to see what a future without water will be like. Every year, an estimated 2,500 sq km of land turns to desert. In Langtoa village, some 300km from the capital, villagers have, for the past 10 years, had to make an 8km round trip to get water from the only well in the area that hasn't yet dried up.

Chen Chichun, 32, and her husband, Yu Wei, haul steel water-tanks along a dry river-bed by tractor to supply their village with water. The trip takes them four hours and they have to repeat it every two days. 'Most of our neighbours have left this area - it's a hard life here without water,' Chen says.

'I've heard about water being diverted to Beijing for the Olympics but that won't help us. No one in the government thinks about giving us the water we need - we're just poor people, we have no voice.'

The water shortage is even more severe 10km away, in the village of Zhengxigao, which clings to a steep-sided mountain gulley. Here, seasonal sand storms from the surrounding desert are causing increasing misery, according to 68-year-old resident Mr Jian.

'No one can go outdoors. The sand gets everywhere,' he says. 'My nephew's house is buried to the rafters every spring. Even now, it's up to the roof top.'

South of the capital, as the finishing touches are put to the mighty canal that will ensure Beijing remains green this summer, the countryside is visibly scorching. Standing at the edge of the canal, farmer Zhao finds it hard to imagine the massive flow of fresh water that will be passing his parched village will not benefit his community.

'We have been told the canal will be heavily guarded and we won't be able to get close to it. The officials must be worried people like us will try to steal water from it. The only thing we can hope for is that some of the water will splash over the sides, seep into the soil and make our village a bit greener and our crops a little healthier.'

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