This scenario found in a posting in The Financial Times might come true. Many great empires have collapsed due to the shortage of water. It is apparently what happened to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. Beijing managed to sabotage Copenhagen Conference, but it does not mean that China environmental problem is solved.
Financial Times
December 30 2009
At the start of the decade you had to look hard for signs of trouble ahead: empty ice-buckets in the casinos of Macau, dry toilets in the bathrooms of Inner Mongolian new-builds.
At the start of the decade you had to look hard for signs of trouble ahead: empty ice-buckets in the casinos of Macau, dry toilets in the bathrooms of Inner Mongolian new-builds.
By 2015, it was obvious: China was seriously parched. The Great Wall of Credit of 2009-2012 had unleashed too much industrial capacity consuming too much water. That exacerbated a nationwide shortage – China had more than a fifth of the world’s population, but only 6 per cent of its fresh water. Efforts to shut down water-guzzling cement and steel plants remained half-hearted: what local government official would wreck his prospects for promotion by putting thousands out of work? Four years later and the crisis has taken on ruinous dimensions. Crop failure and famine in the deserted interiors; emergency rationing in the teeming coastal cities.
This could have been averted. Ten years ago China had it all: a well-nourished workforce, vast reserves of paper money, a new swagger on the international stage. The sharp currency revaluation of 2010 unleashed a global mergers and acquisitions spree the likes of which the world had never seen. But the most vital element was taken for granted. In 2009 China spent about Rmb10bn on improving irrigation – 1/1000th of the total loans disbursed that year. The Ministry of Water Resources was then just one of 27 under the State Council; minister Chen Lei’s portfolio included trade, tourism and looking after ports. Projects to divert rivers were sold as demonstrations of what a nation could do, rather than what it should. Channelling the Yangtze wowed engineers globally; meanwhile factories befouled tributaries without penalty. A humbled nation long ago abandoned such pharaonic gestures. That president Xi Jinping is considering beseeching poorer neighbours for food aid is a measure of how far the mighty have fallen.
At the start of the decade you had to look hard for signs of trouble ahead: empty ice-buckets in the casinos of Macau, dry toilets in the bathrooms of Inner Mongolian new-builds.
By 2015, it was obvious: China was seriously parched. The Great Wall of Credit of 2009-2012 had unleashed too much industrial capacity consuming too much water. That exacerbated a nationwide shortage – China had more than a fifth of the world’s population, but only 6 per cent of its fresh water. Efforts to shut down water-guzzling cement and steel plants remained half-hearted: what local government official would wreck his prospects for promotion by putting thousands out of work? Four years later and the crisis has taken on ruinous dimensions. Crop failure and famine in the deserted interiors; emergency rationing in the teeming coastal cities.
This could have been averted. Ten years ago China had it all: a well-nourished workforce, vast reserves of paper money, a new swagger on the international stage. The sharp currency revaluation of 2010 unleashed a global mergers and acquisitions spree the likes of which the world had never seen. But the most vital element was taken for granted. In 2009 China spent about Rmb10bn on improving irrigation – 1/1000th of the total loans disbursed that year. The Ministry of Water Resources was then just one of 27 under the State Council; minister Chen Lei’s portfolio included trade, tourism and looking after ports. Projects to divert rivers were sold as demonstrations of what a nation could do, rather than what it should. Channelling the Yangtze wowed engineers globally; meanwhile factories befouled tributaries without penalty. A humbled nation long ago abandoned such pharaonic gestures. That president Xi Jinping is considering beseeching poorer neighbours for food aid is a measure of how far the mighty have fallen.
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