One way or another, water is the source of many of China's natural calamities. Historically, the country has suffered from excess supply, with flooding on the Yangtze River bringing regular devastation to central provinces for centuries.
Today, a new and arguably more dangerous water threat has appeared. As insatiable industrial expansion and a ballooning population make impossible demands on existing resources, large parts of the country are running dry.
The solution - in the best tradition of previous man-against-nature construction projects, including the Three Gorges Dam which supposedly is the answer to Yangtze River flooding - is both blunt and breathtaking. A series of vast infrastructure projects simply divert the country's water supply from where there is too much, in the south, to where there is too little, in the north.
Water shortages arise for reasons that are partly natural and partly man-made. In the humid south, there is abundant water - 80 per cent of the mainland's supply - but relatively inhospitable terrain.
The dry north, on the other hand, boasts 70 per cent of the country's arable land that must be irrigated with only 20 per cent of available water.
As the population has increased from less than 500 million to more than 1.3 billion in the past 50 years, farming in the four key northern river basins - the Yellow, Hai, Huai, and Liao - has tapped ever-increasing amounts of water for irrigation.
Industrial usage, while proportionately lower, also has seen rapid expansion.