Sub-theme
5. Establishing Sustainable Water Infrastructures
Topic
5-2. Large inter-basin water diversion projects
Body
This is a retrospective on China's water infrastructure of nearly half a century ago, as observed by American water engineers and social scientists; and on pre-project considerations by both Chinese and international water experts of what subsequently was one of China's largest and institutionally as well as technically most complex set of infrastructure projects, to tap the waters of the south to supplement thosee of the north. For one month in 1974, I was a member of the US Water Resources Delegation to China, organized by IWRA’s first President, Ven Te Chow. I prepared the trip report. The delegation itself was headed by two eminent US engineers, Hunter Rouse and Maurice Albertson. We visited a number of hydraulic installations, including Xinanjiang Reservoir, the dikes of the Yellow River at Huayuankou and the Red Flag Canal. I returned for a month in 1980 as a member of the UNU-Chinese Academy of Sciences field study and joint symposium on the environmental effects of long-distance water transfers. For the field study, we traversed the proposed Middle and Eastern routes of the South-North Water Transfer Project (南水北调). Subsequently, I was co-editor of the book of papers resulting from the symposium (Long Distance Water Transfer, or 长距调水), together with Zuo Dakang, Asit Biswas, and Liu Changming. The UNU delegation included two later IWRA Presidents, Asit Biswas and Mahmoud Abu-Zeid. In this presentation, I will give a brief overview of those two early exchanges involving international and Chinese water resources specialists, emphasizing the relationship between humans and nature in China as seen at the time by external specialists observing built and prospective water infrastructure, and illustrated by slides that I took at the time. I will give my thoughts on the sustainability of some of the projects we saw and considered, and on the slipperiness of the very idea of sustainability, with some consideration to how China's water sector has evolved since then, and how it is likely to evolve. Prints of some of these slides will be offered for display at the Congress.