Project marks key victory in water supply

TIANJIN－Fan Lanchi, 58, still remembers the flavor of a cup of tea 39 years ago, when he was a student at Nankai University.

The tea was a gift for residents in North China's Tianjin to mark the completion of a project diverting water from the Luanhe River in the neighboring Hebei province to Tianjin at a time when the latter was suffering from water shortages.

"It tasted so sweet," says Fan, who is now an official of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, working to protect water resources in the Haihe River basin.

Now, Fan's teacup is often filled with the water from the Yangtze River thanks to the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. It has benefited more than 140 million people and optimized the economic development patterns of more than 40 large and medium-sized cities.

Since ancient times, China has seen floods in summer and droughts in winter, with water shortages in the north and an abundance in the south. That uneven water distribution in terms of time and space has troubled the country for centuries.

"The country has been making great efforts to reduce water scarcity over recent decades," Fan says.

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project is a prime example. It transfers water from the Yangtze River to dry areas in northern China through eastern, middle, and western routes, and is the largest such project in the world.

After decades of preparation and instruction, the first phase of its middle and eastern routes began supplying water at the end of 2014. More than 7.3 billion cubic meters of water had been diverted to Beijing as of December.

China has also been striving to solve the problem of drinking water in rural areas.

In 2015, residents of Hebei's Qian'ganjian village that neighbors Beijing still drank rainwater stored in the cellar of their homes. The village struggled with the problem of fresh water for decades and drilled 14 deep wells. But none of them could produce a stable water supply.

At the end of that year, the 15th well dug by the villagers finally succeeded, and helped the village shake off poverty.

Years of great endeavor gradually paid off. With tap water accessible to over 80 percent of rural households in China as of 2020, rural Chinese have bid farewell to the various hardships they have been through with shortages or substandard water quality.

China's water resources stood at 2,325.67 billion cubic meters in 2011, when its total population was 1.35 billion. In 2020, the two figures read 3,160.52 billion and 1.41 billion, respectively.

"The growth rate of China's total water resources in the past decade is higher than that of its population, which means China's arduous efforts to solve water shortages have taken effect," says Fan.

Xinhua