China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
High and Dry
You can live a reduced lifetime on dirty air. And usually only the very young or very old succumb to tainted food. Without potable water, however, even the healthiest human organism can only last a maximum of four days.
No, China hasn’t run out of water, just yet. But with a quarter of the world’s population and three to four percent of its H20, She would do well to treat it as a resource more precious than oil.
However, the short-term priority is clear: Olympic face, a face that must be washed clean. To that effect, 300 million cubic meters of clean water will be diverted from Shaanxi to flush out Beijing’s generally fetid canals, ensuring that our distinguished foreign guests will have no reason to wrinkle their delicate noses. At least not at our bodies of water.
The big flush, as well as another siphoning to ensure Olympic visitors can rehydrate and enjoy forty minute steaming showers in their hotels, will come courtesy of millions of farmers in Shaanxi, who needless to say depend on the water to make a crop.
But to leave water’s critical role in agriculture out of it, consider how the capitol’s well runneth increasingly dry. The average person in China has 2300 cubic meters of water per year, a quarter of the world’s average. The UN defines anything under one thousand cubic meters as a water shortage. Those of us in the Beijing basin have 292.
Don’t expect the taps to stop working anytime soon. But it’s past time to acknowledge that our extra-moist, just-washed lifestyles are exacting a mounting toll on this country’s scarcest resource, and to guarantee that Shaanxi’s wheat crop quota is filled before any Olympic swimming pools.
Related posts:
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
