The Yellow River in China

¶ … Yellow River of China

The People's Republic of China as part of East Asia is south of Mongolia and the Siberian land mass, west of the Korean Peninsula and insular Japan, north of Southeast Asia and east of Central South Asia. It has a total land area of nearly 10 million square kilometers

China has a total area of nearly 9,596,960 square kilometers. About 69% of its land consists of mountains, hills, and highlands. It has 50,000 rivers with a total of 420,000 kilometers and most of them flow from west to east and then empty into the Pacific Ocean. The most important and best-known are the Yangzte, Yellow and the Black Dragon Rivers. Yangzte is the longest river in the world. The Yellow River or Huanghe is the second longest. It rises in Tibet and journeys for 5,464 kilometers through North China until it reaches the Bo Hai Gulf in the north coast of Shandong Province.

On January 5, 2005, China's population reached 1.3 billion. It has been considered the most populous country in the world for many centuries now. The annual population growth rate was placed at 0.59% in 2006. The most thickly populated areas are the east of Jiangsu, Shangdong, Henan and Shanghai. In 2004, approximately 62% of the population lived in rural areas and 38% in the urban areas. In 2005, China had a gross domestic product of U.S.$2.2 trillion and its purchasing power parity in 005 was nearly U.S.$8.9 trillion per capita.

The Yellow River is the source of life for Northern China, where 43% of the population lives. Yet it has only 14% of the country's water supply..Cities and communities have crowded along the River, in the hope of partaking with the rewards of growth and prosperity. The national policy also encourages it. The threat of flooding has already characterized the River from the beginning. Recent conditions present a further threat to the River's capability of sustaining the overcrowding and its consequences. The region's major cities are growing rapidly. In Ningxia alone, centuries of irrigation have created an oasis. For centuries, its farmers have believed that the Yellow River is a great gift to them and viewed it as an endless resource. Water demand has risen in the area and air pollution has reportedly reached alarming levels. Today, the lack of adequate water supply, especially in the Yellow River region, is among China's biggest problems.

In the 90s, the River ran so low that it was unable to reach the sea. Engineers built dams and dikes, which momentarily seemed to have solved the problem. But the huge amounts of sediment held back by the dikes and the dams began pushing the River upward. The River also began rising. The height of the dams had to be increased to prevent floods. This was in addition to the already chronic problem of flooding. Ningxia village farmers are not mindful of the amount of water they drain from the River. They pin their minds on the national priority set by Chinese officials that China must be able to feed itself. Recently, however, a greater fear of water shortage compelled the officials to adopt conservation efforts.

Human activities, particularly in the past 50 years, have intensely affected the Yellow River.

These include soil-water conservation in the upper and middle drainage basin, flood protection in the lower reaches, flow regulation and water diversion in the whole drainage basin. A study on the overall trend of channel sedimentation between 1950 and 1997 showed that erosion control measures and water diversion had counteractive impacts. These measures led to a decline in sediment supply to the Yellow River. Human activities, which required river flow regulation and water diversion resulted in the great reduction in river flow. Their effects counterbalanced each other so that the overall trend of channel sedimentation remained unchanged. This finding suggested that the overuse of river water cannot be controlled. It also emphasized that the reduction of channel sedimentation in the lower Yellow River cannot be achieved through erosion and sediment control measures.

China has been the economic marvel of the world in the past 20 or so years. It has performed a peerless feat of turning itself from a desperately poor nation into a huge economic power. It raised its gross domestic product from 1979 to 1997 from $43.6 billion to $904 billion or a huge 2,100%. A chief consequence of its vast economic growth has been the production of more consumer goods than ever in its history. Its people can now afford what money can buy. Most importantly, they can now have enough food to eat. It appears that the combination of capitalist principles and a Communist dictatorship has worked for China to foster economic growth. But it has also brought them new and immense problems, which now threaten the very survival of Communist China's society. Its blessing of rapid economic growth has also made China the world's most polluted nation. The factories and coal-burning power plants have polluted the air and the water. Almost all the major rivers, including the Yellow River, are now full of poisonous chemicals. Government reports said that 86% of the water in these rivers in Chinese cities have become unfit for drinking or fishing. Coal-burning has also turned the air in large cities, like Beijing, into poisonous smog. As a result, Chinese health authorities said that approximately 300,000 Chinese die from pollution-related diseases. This amazing economic growth in the most populous country in the world also brought about unimagined disasters on the country's two most important rivers. The Yangtze, called the cradle of China's ancient civilization, overflowed in banks. The overflow killed 3,600 people and put 64 million acres under water. The cutting down of hillside forests was identified as the cause of the disaster. The cutting down was the response to the growing demand for construction wood and paper. The hills along the Yangtze were so eroded of trees as to make the River shallow enough for heavy rains to cause severe flooding. The Yellow River, on the other hand, has been drying up. It has been overused for irrigation, industrial use and other commercial uses. More and more Chinese now have washing machines, dishwashers and other modern water-using appliances. Recent statistics said that more than 300 of China's 600 cities now face acute water shortage. The situation has gone so bad that some residents are said to be allowed to have a trickle of water for only a few hours a day.

A budget of $9.7 billion was set aside by the Chinese government for the construction of thousands of new soil dams. These new soil dams would filter sediment out of runoff water going to the Yellow River. This was to prevent flooding the River's lower reaches. These sill retention structures would be built on the Loess Plateau of Central China. It was estimated that 1.6 billion tons of sediment flow from the Plateau into the Yellow River annually. The investment would also replant trees in farms built in the 70s. The Plateau was said to have been subjected to centuries of deforestation and improper conversion of sloped pasture land to crop cultivation. It was also subject to severe overgrazing, considered the world's worst areas for soil erosion.

The dams would have filters, which would allow water to pass but block sediment. The dams would prevent the surrounding topsoil at a depth of 100-300 meters from filling the Riverbed and then raise its level higher than the surrounding land. China began building soil dams in 1980. They proved effective in controlling flood, although some said the dams held water back when it was needed downstream. Zhu Xiaoyong of the central government's Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee in Henan Province said that soil dams were particularly useful when sudden and heavy rain storms threatened to flood the River. He was confident that the investment would improve the living standards of the 70 million affected rural residents in the Plateau. The Plateau completely or partly covers Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces and the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. The World Bank funded a watershed rehabilitation project in the same Plateau at $300 million.

A bank report said that about 430,000 square kilometers of the 640,000-square-kilometer Plateau was subjected to severe erosion. This resulted in sedimentation and flood water carried to the lower reaches of the Yellow River. Flooding claimed enormous losses in lives and property. In response, strong river embankments and reservoirs were constructed. But silt continued to be deposited in the lower reaches of the river bed and even rose to an alarming rate of one meter every 10 years. When the silt exceeded 10 meters above the surrounding farm lands, flood protection dikes had to be raised and this was costly. The inappropriate use of water resources and the lack of water conservation awareness could only mean that the overuse of water resources did not meet "needs." Over-extraction of groundwater could happen in the arid north, where the Yellow River is, and in the water-rich south as well.

Another consequence of the exploitative use of water resources is the destruction of mangrove forests and the fragmentation of the habitats of endangered species. The United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna listed 189 endangered species in China among the 740 in the world.

Sand content is quite high in the Yellow River. In the dry season, sand rises and flies up with the wind and soil desertization becomes severe. In addition, the River's dri-up directly reduces the quantity of water for farmland irrigation. The supply of ground water decreases while the exploitation quantity of ground water increases. The results would include a deep crescent of ground water, a decrease of land evapo-transpiration, local climate drying, soil desertization, a reduction of biotic population and a simplification of biocommunity structure.

Another serious problem confronted in the Yellow River is nitrogen contamination. A study found that, with an increase in economic activities in the Yellow River's upper basin, the nitrogen concentration in the tributaries increased. This, in turn, increased the nitrogen concentration of the mainstream from the upper and lower reaches. Secondly, nitrogen in the River water was mainly attributed to point sources. And thirdly, the ammonium nitrogen and total inorganic nitrogen content of the River water increased significantly from 1980 to 1999. This was a time when water discharge and nitrogenous fertilizer application in the Yellow River catchment increased.