Sustainable growth was one of the buzzwords at the recent annual meetings of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Premier Wen Jiabao said the target growth rate for the economy would be lowered to 7 per cent for the next five years, and promised that the mainland would not 'blindly' pursue development that was unsustainable. Above all, he pledged that the environment would not be sacrificed for the sake of boosting industrial output.
The Communist Party has no use for irony, so Wen's words were greeted with the solemn applause that characterises NPC meetings. That is despite the fact that the delegates were sitting in the centre of Beijing, a metropolis that could be the poster boy for unsustainable growth. Overpopulated and with roads as clogged as a 60-a-day smoker's arteries, the capital is above all suffering from a drought that gets more serious by the year.
Step forward the South-North Water Diversion Project, the much-vaunted, long-awaited silver bullet that is supposed to cure Beijing's parched state. A relic of the Maoist era - it was Mao Zedong who in 1952 first suggested transferring water from the south of China to the arid north - the scheme called for three routes to funnel water north from the Yangtze River. But, almost 60 years on, none of the routes are close to completion, while the costs continue to rise inexorably.
Students of Chinese history will know that the mainland's leaders have long favoured super-expensive public works of dubious value. While the Three Gorges Dam is the most recent example, the Great Wall stands as a reminder of a ruinously expensive structure that completely failed to do its job.
But the South-North project is shaping up to be the biggest white elephant of them all. The western route, which calls for the Yangtze River to be diverted into the Yellow River via huge tunnels under the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, has already been postponed indefinitely due to the immense engineering difficulties involved. Both the central route and the eastern section are also behind schedule.
Worse still, the officials in charge of the eastern route have indicated that the cost of their part of the project is set to rise further, due to the need to spend more fixing the ever-increasing amount of pollution problems in the areas that line the route. That is despite the fact that 420 billion yuan (HK$498 billion) has already been earmarked for the entire scheme, more than double the amount spent on the Three Gorges Dam.