Where China's Rivers Run Dry

Then there is the monumental South-North Water Transfer Project, a $62.5 billion plan to move 50 billion cubic meters of water via three new diversion projects from the Yangtze River in the central part of the country to the North China Plain. The first phase of this Herculean project, the 722-mile-long Eastern Route along the old Grand Canal, is scheduled to come online later this year. But some environmentalists fear that shifting the increasingly polluted water of the Yangtze northward will also introduce a whole host of new toxic pollutants to the breadbasket of China.

No one knows what the consequences of all these Promethean efforts will be. For a century and a half, China's inability to defend itself against the industrialized world inculcated it with a deeply felt yearning to regain fuqiang, or "wealth and power." In the truly magnificent facilities being built for the Olympics, one can see a clear manifestation of this understandable urge to restore Chinese greatness. The question is whether China's limited natural-resource base can sustain the magnitude of such an ambition. With water, the country is confronting the edge of one very inflexible environmental envelope. Beijing's glorious Water Cube is a symbol both of China's remarkable accomplishments, and its all-too-pressing limits.

Schell is the Arthur Ross director at the Asia Society's Center for U.S.-China Relations.

© 2007