Below is the eleventh in a series of oral histories about Beijing water, as told to An He and Wang Jian by Li Zhenwe. Mr. Li is from Shahe Village in Daxing County and a former engineer at the water bureau in the Daxing County. You can download the pdf here.
Below is the ninth in a series of oral histories about Beijing water, as told to An He and Wang Jian by Li Yuling, a long-time resident of Beijing.
(December 22, 2008) This capital’s growing thirst for clean water is clashing with provincial demands and concerns that plans to tap China’s rivers will hurt an already troubled environment.
(December 17, 2009) Beijing can save at least 190 million cu m water per year – double the capacity of Guanting Reservoir – if the extravagant lifestyle of its residents can be controlled, a leading NGO said after the water price hearing yesterday.
(December 11, 2008) China has postponed completion of its multi-billion dollar water transfer scheme to bring water from the Yangtze river to Beijing, citing water pollution and other environmental risks as the reason for pushing the completion date back four years, official media reported last week.
(October 2, 2008) Beijing’s demand for water is putting pressure on upstream Hebei and Shanxi provinces to tap new supplies. South Wind Window reporter Tian Lei investigates north China’s devastating water crisis.
(July 8, 2008) Experts and environmental activists have submitted a petition asking the Chinese government to reassess the safety of large-scale dam projects and make their findings public.
(July 14, 2008) “The 500,000 foreign visitors expected to visit Beijing will certainly get to see some beautiful waterworks, such as the largest fountain in the world in Shunyi. No problem! But the question is: what will happen after the Games? How will people cope?” asks journalist Dai Qing.
(December 1, 2007) Beijing’s dead waterways will be brought back to life—temporarily—in time for the Olympic Games, reports The Age. Officials will pump 3 billion cubic metres of water into the city from four dams in neighbouring Hebei province to replenish the water in the city’s dirty canal system.
(August 2, 2007) An article by Science Times reporter Yi Yongyong based on a recent talk by Chinese environmentalist Wang Jian takes us through some of the water supply problems facing Beijing. Starting from the city’s pre-PRC history and moving through the half-century since, he brings us up to the present situation and speculates on the future. He focuses on two of the largest reservoirs that have until recently been among Beijing’s primary sources.
(December 26, 2005) As with the Three Gorges project, China’s south-north water transfer scheme would endanger a vast number of cultural relics. Sites to be submerged contain dinosaur-egg fossils dating back 60 million years and human skeletons from the Stone Age.
(September 1, 2003) ‘Big engineering projects only make matters worse, causing us to reach the limits of our water resources. It is time to review our water strategy,’ says environmental consultant and author Ma Jun.
(March 14, 2002) In a sign that China’s rubber-stamp legislature is getting more assertive, a legislator has contended that projects concerning national strategy need to be examined and approved by the National People’s Congress (NPC), adding that a case in point is the gigantic South-North Water-Diversion Project.
(February 17, 2001) Although he lives near the Hongze Lake, China’s fourth largest freshwater lake, Yan Fengxia still has to buy mineral water for drinking or even cooking. "Our life gets harder as fish die due to increasing water pollution," said Yan, a fishwife who has been fishing for more than 20 years on the lake, located in the middle reaches of the Huaihe River in east China’s Jiangsu Province.
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