Few projects capture the scale of Beijing’s ambitions for managing the country’s water resources better than its planned hydropower dam in the lower reaches of Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo river. Once completed, it will dwarf anything that has come before.
Quietly approved on Christmas Day, the controversial proposal will exploit the river’s “Great Bend”, where it makes a hairpin turn around a nearly 8,000 metres high Himalayan peak, losing about 2,000 metres in elevation before entering neighbouring India.
With plans for about three times the installed capacity of what is currently the world’s biggest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, analysts have estimated the facility could cost $137bn to build. That would make it one of the world’s most expensive energy projects.
Beijing’s embrace of the plan, among scores of similar mega-projects, is a reminder of China’s historic obsession with controlling its water resources, says Genevieve Donnellon-May, research associate at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“There are strong historical and cultural ties between China’s leaders and water,” she explains, citing Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic. Mao’s idea that “man is born to conquer nature” continues to hold sway, she says.
The challenge for China remains how to implement mega-projects without destroying local communities and the environment, while also considering diplomatic challenges, such as how to deal with neighbouring countries that depend on the same river basins.
Water scarcity has long been an issue for policymakers in China, which has the world’s second-biggest population, of 1.4bn, but about 6 per cent of the world’s water resources. On top of this, its water resources are unevenly distributed, with the south generally wetter than the dry north and west.
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China’s leaders have traditionally lauded engineering-led solutions, perhaps because many of them have technical backgrounds. President Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydraulic engineer. Xi has even published a book on water governance, which includes a celebration of the Dujiangyan flood control and irrigation system, originally built in about 250BC.
In an attempt to recreate that kind of success on a national scale, China launched its south-to-north water diversion project more than two decades ago — the world’s biggest scheme of its type to move water between basins. The plan envisages “three verticals”, where water flows south to north via existing rivers, canals and tunnels, and “four horizontals” — rivers connecting east to west.
The first two south-north verticals in the east and centre of China opened in 2013 and 2014 respectively. The eastern route takes water from the Yangtze in the south to provinces such as Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and Hebei, and Tianjin city.
The middle route takes water from Hubei in central China to Henan and Hebei provinces, and Beijing and Tianjin.
The western vertical will take it from the Tibetan plateau to areas such as northwestern Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia provinces.
These inter-basin projects have alleviated scarcity in the destination locations. But experts point to multiple concerns, from pollution and shortages in areas that are donating water, to environmental problems, such as increasing salinisation of the soil and the transfer of invasive species between basins.
In addition, future climate change could threaten inter-basin water transfer projects, say researchers at the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, in eastern Jiangsu province, and the Yangtze Institute for Conservation and Development, also in Nanjing. “Ensuring stable operation under climate extremes” would be critical to projects such as the western Qinghai vertical, they said in a 2023 research paper.
China is overlaying the south-north water diversion project with a so-called national water grid, which connects other basins to the bigger framework to create a countrywide system. But these moves can face resistance from provincial governments in water-donating areas, says Donnellon-May. “Sometimes when more ambitious inter-basin water transfer proposals have been pushed forward . . . there has been some kind of backlash raised online,” she says, whether from water users in the donating province, scientists or others.
Some water projects have provoked fierce criticism from other countries. The Tibet Yarlung Tsangpo project has raised concerns in India, where the river is known as the Brahmaputra, and downstream in Bangladesh, where it is called the Jamuna. Beijing has provided little public information on the scheme — even the exact location of the proposed dam is unknown. That has fuelled speculation in India, a geopolitical rival, that China could use the facility strategically, by withholding water for example.
China insists the project is needed for economic and environmental reasons. It will allow the country to hit net zero carbon targets and prioritise “ecological protection” and development, it says.
Activists say it threatens the area’s unique ecosystem and local communities. It also lies in an area of high seismic activity, raising worries of potential inundation for those downstream in India and Bangladesh. But since only an estimated 3 per cent of the Yarlung Tsangpo basin’s potential for hydropower development has been tapped, it was inevitable that Beijing would try to build more mega-dams on the river.
In China, as Barry Sautman, political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, explains, there would only ever “be a few instances where projects are stopped entirely because of the environmental impact”.
