Experts fear Lintao’s dry-up is a sign of things to come. Probe International fellow and noted Chinese environmental journalist, Dai Qing, says China’s water scarcity and toxicity is the greatest danger facing her country today.
China’s ambitious South-to-North Water Diversion project officially begins flowing next month and the impacts of the costly geo-engineering giant are starting to be felt in the regions tapped to redistribute water to the country’s parched north. “This project from the beginning has been as controversial as the Three Gorges,” says Probe International fellow and leading Chinese environmental journalist, Dai Qing.
(November 6, 2010) It might be the most ambitious construction project in China since the Great Wall.
(November 3, 2010) Dai Qing, a Probe International fellow, leading Chinese activist and journalist will be giving a speech at the University of British Columbia on November 9, detailing her battle against the Three Gorges dam and quest to protect the country’s dwindling water supplies.
(September 29, 2010) The $62-billion South-North Water Diversion, which will bring water to the parched capital, is being compared to the Great Wall. But environmentalists are up in arms about the ‘replumbing’ of the nation’s great rivers.
(June 12, 2010) Huang Wanli, renowned hydraulics engineer and Tsinghua University lecturer, first voiced his opposition to the large-scale damming of rivers by opposing the construction of the Sanmenxia dam in 1957. In the 1980s he became a vocal opponent of the Three Gorges project and contributed to Yangtze! Yangtze!, the important critique of the dam compiled by China’s celebrated investigative journalist, Dai Qing. Now, as the Three Gorges dam is beset by monumental operational problems, Huang Wanli’s prescient analysis helps explain why it was a mistake to build the biggest dam in the world. Read his 1993 interview with Dai Qing.
(December 14, 2009) Standing in the rubble of her home, with the sun setting on the graves of her ancestors behind her, Li De breaks down as she describes being relocated to make way for the Chinese government’s latest grand engineering project. Her house in rural Henan province will soon be submerged beneath a reservoir feeding the central route of the biggest water scheme in history – the “south-north water diversion project”.
(October 20, 2009) The Chinese government is once again making headlines for relocating its citizens—this time for the much-criticized South-to-North Water Diversion Project. According to Xinhua, the resettlement of 330,000 Chinese citizens in central China’s Hubei and Henan provinces has begun.
(October 3, 2008) Beijing’s water crisis is back in the news after a few months’ hiatus around the Olympic Games.
(June 11, 2008) While earthquake damage sustained by the country’s dams may pose serious threats, many are turning to the dams themselves for explanations. Probe International Fellow Dai Qing says: “We must look carefully at the questions: How do dams impact earthquakes? How do earthquakes impact dams?”
(January 17, 2003) Beijingers have been warned against regarding the south-north water-transfer scheme as an excuse to waste more water, while continuing to neglect water-saving strategies.
(August 18, 2001) Following up on Mao’s big idea
Patricia Adams
Brady Yauch
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Lisa Peryman
Other News Sources