Water is becoming scarce in China. The groundwater reservoir is exhausted after years of overuse. Xi Jinping must now act quickly, otherwise
Water shortages are becoming a global problem: Johannesburg in South Africa and Karachi in Pakistan were already facing water shortages, and other cities such as London could follow suit in the coming years. Experts call the moment when no more water runs out of the tap “Day Zero”. Then the groundwater reservoir will be exhausted, after years of overuse, sometimes coupled with mismanagement and in recent years accelerated by months of drought, which will become more and more a normal phenomenon worldwide.
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China fares the same as many other countries on the blue planet. The country is currently being hit by a drought not seen in the past sixty years since records began. In Sichuan province, the government has had to close factories to reduce electricity consumption and ensure that at least private households have electricity.
In Sichuan, 80 percent of the energy is provided by hydroelectric power. Despite these efforts, many households have to go without electricity for a few hours a day. Further east, following the Yangtze, the river level is so low that cargo ships can no longer transport essential parts.
Important car parts are manufactured in Sichuan, including for Tesla. The US automaker rolls off the assembly line in Shanghai more than 20,000 vehicles a week. But production stutters and threatens to overturn the entire production process for the electric vehicle. The energy consumption for the Chinese industry, which is important for the world economy, is the one moment of crisis that arises from the water shortage. The food shortage is the second and is likely to exceed the first in terms of urgency and relevance for the people of the People’s Republic.
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In the arid north of the country, to which the government in Beijing has water pumped for agriculture via pipelines, the availability of water per capita is less than half the 253 cubic meters reported by the United Nations, according to Foreign magazine, despite these cost-intensive measures Affairs reports.
As a comparison intended to illustrate the drastic situation in China, the article cites Egypt as an example: In the country on the Nile, for whose inhabitants drought is nothing new, every Egyptian woman has 570 cubic meters of water at her disposal.
In addition, around 30 percent of the groundwater in the People’s Republic is undrinkable due to pollution. 16 percent of it can’t even be used in agriculture, it’s that dirty. For the past few decades, the Chinese Communist Party, which has dictatorially ruled the country, has concealed the full extent of the pollution it is responsible for.
Now the misery is coming to light and is already leading to upheavals in the population: the city government of Shanghai wrote an angry letter to Sichuan and demanded that the important parts for Tesla and co. would continue to be produced and shipped. That would mean that private households would have to starve. There was a heated argument on Weibo, the Chinese social internet that is controlled and censored by the government.
These clashes are likely to intensify if droughts cause staple foods such as rice and wheat to become scarce. So far, around 60 percent of the wheat that China produces has been grown in the north. If there were crop failures due to drought, the People’s Republic would have to buy the missing grain at high prices on the international market.
However, China’s leader Xi Jinping has made it a maxim of his reign to make the country independent of foreign countries. It would therefore not be easy to get the people of China, who have been bombarded with extreme nationalist slogans for a decade, attuned to this change in policy. The same applies to rice, which is grown in the south of the country and is the number one staple food in many Asian countries, especially for the poor. They could not cope with a price increase and would have to starve.
In the past, the CP had encouraged farmers with financial incentives to grow more crops, thereby polluting the soil and groundwater. It has dropped by a meter every year. The government in Beijing is now trying to stop this process with innovative methods and to get to deeper groundwater. Xi Jinping knows he must act quickly: Five of ancient China’s 17 dynasties were overthrown because drought led to famine.
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
