Visitors
to China are carefully warned that the water is not potable and must be
boiled thoroughly before consumption. Every hotel room has a small
water boiler for this purpose, and the more expensive ones provide a
nightly bottle of safe drinking water by the bedside. Water quality
problems are traditionally associated with the continuing use of “night
soil” (human and animal waste) to fertilize crops—an effective and
inexpensive alternative with an inexhaustible supply. Yet the problem
continues even as farmers embrace more modern chemical fertilizers
(perhaps too heartily, at the alarming expense of soil health),
and as other contaminants enter the water supply. While visiting the
old city of Lijiang in Yunnan Province, for example, I rose for an early
morning walk to find cooks cleaning the carcasses of recently killed
animals, intestines and all, directly into the Venice-like canals from which others draw their drinking water.
Shortly before our arrival, we were warned by a vaccination nurse
familiar with the most dangerous waterborne diseases to only
sponge-bathe our 3-year-old, rather than risk his inadvertent exposure
to waterborne parasites through his open eyes or mouth in a shower.
Once here, we quickly decided that this level of precaution was
unnecessary, at least in urban areas where the municipal water supply
receives some level of filtration or disinfection before
reaching the tap (especially true in Beijing). Still, we have learned
well the rules of life here in China: drink only boiled or bottled
water, no ice that can’t be sourced to boiled or bottled water, no
fruits or vegetables that haven’t been cooked or peeled, and brush teeth
with tap water at your own risk. (Some friends do; others, including
me, don’t.) You should also ensure that bottled water is truly
factory-sealed, as scandals have occasionally revealed empty bottles
refilled with tap water being resold as new.
Without a doubt, adapting to life without potable water was the
biggest cultural adjustments for us when we arrived last summer. The
first consequence was minor physical dehydration: without easily
accessible clean water to drink, we drank less, and soon found ourselves
more easily exhausted, ornery, and sick. (Indeed, nothing confirms the
critical nature of this life-sustaining resource more effectively than
losing the taken-for-granted tap.) Every journey away from our
apartment involves water planning, as we take careful stock of how many
are traveling, what will be needed, and how best to transport it. I
seem to drink more than my Chinese friends, but I still seem to be
always thirsty.
And there were other puzzling features of our new world. For
example, we struggled to understand at exactly what point our dishes
were clean enough to eat off after washing them in tap water. Were the
still damp chopsticks safe to use, or the recently-washed cup still
bearing that fine sheen? And when dealing with my son’s inevitable
scraped knees and elbows, was it better to wash with soap and water to
disinfect, or was the water itself a source of potential harm? (For the
record, we have decided that dishes must be completely dry to be safe,
and that cuts should be washed with soap and water until the dirt is
out, but subsequently sterilized with disinfectant whenever possible.)
Chinese culture adapted long ago to the perils of non-potable water.
Chinese people boil all their water before drinking it, but it doesn’t
seem like a burden, because they prefer to drink their water hot. They
range from amused to amazed when foreigners request cold water, which to
them is as distasteful as drinking plain hot water is those
foreigners. When I invite my students to ask questions of cultural
exchange—anything they want to know about American culture, politics, or
lifestyle—the most frequent question is always “Why do Americans like
to drink cold water? (Yuck!)” Perhaps as a result, there is no
groundswell of popular sentiment to “do something” about the water
situation. From the perspective of most Chinese, there is no problem
with the water. Everything is as it should be.
Yet
China is suffering from increasingly serious water pollution problems
that can’t just be boiled away. Chemical pollutants entering the water
supply from industry and agriculture are getting worse, involving toxins
oblivious to disinfectants. The World Health Organization has
identified 2221 different pollutants
in waters worldwide, and 765 of them in drinking water—but current
drinking water standards test for only 35 indicators, and new criteria
that will go into effect on July 1st will regulate only 106 pollutants.
(Source: Dr. Yu Ming, water pollution researcher at Ocean University of
China.) Chinese lawmakers and the Ministry of the Environment are struggling to cope with these problems through the PRC Law to Prevent and Control Water Pollution, but the even greater hurdle for environmental law is that of implementation.
Even where China’s environmental laws are comprehensive, their goals are imperiled by under-enforcement.
Illegal discharging is reportedly very common, because there simply
aren’t enough agency personnel to monitor them. And even when
violations are discovered, they may or may not be prosecuted by the
relevant government agency—depending, perhaps, on the economic
importance of the violators, or their political influence. When the
government fails to act, it can be hard for citizens and NGOs to take up
the slack, because most Chinese courts don’t recognize standing for
public-interest citizen suits. And even if traditional standing were
established by a directly injured party, the court may or may not decide
to hear the case (for my money, one of the most surprising features of
the Chinese legal system). For these reasons and others, enforcement is
usually seen as the major weakness in China’s environmental law
regime. Perhaps China’s new experimentation with a handful of specialty
environmental courts will help redress these important problems.
In the meanwhile, water quality problems intersect with and
exacerbate other environmental problems. For example, one unfortunate
consequence of unreliable tap water is the resulting prevalence of
disposables: single-use bottled water, disposable plates and bowls, even
the single-use toothbrushes that hotels at every level routinely
provide. I spent the last year spearheading a university sustainability initiative that
sought personal pledges to avoid bottled water and other disposables as
much as possible, so it was particularly jarring for me to adjust to
this new norm—where we are happy to eat at a restaurant that provides
disposable bowls, plates, and chopsticks, because we know they won’t
make us sick that evening. (And I was happy to note that, at least at
our favorite local restaurant, the plasticware is marked as
biodegradable.) By contrast, at restaurants that provide the reusables I
normally seek out at home, we nervously try to sterilize them with hot
tea before using them, because they have likely been rinsed in the
too-thoroughly recycled dirty dishwater that compounds the problems
already coming out of the tap.
So, after religiously toting my reusable aluminum bottle to my every
American class last year, I now carry plastic bottles of water
everywhere. And though I reuse the small bottles as long as possible
rather than discarding them after a single use, they are usually filled
with water that I get at home from the water-cooler bottle that many
Chinese families use. On any given day, you can spot a handful of
strong men riding motor-scooters with an improbably number of these
strapped to the back, exchanging filled ones for empties at private
homes and businesses. I’m happy to report that at least these large
bottles are faithfully recycled. But I’m unhappy to say that smaller
plastic bottles litter the streets, parks, mountains, landfills,
beaches, and accordingly, rivers and oceans.
Neither is the important relationship between water quality and water quantity lost on China, which has one of the lowest per capita rates of fresh water in
the world. Northern China is arid and especially lacking sufficient
water, marked by some of the world’s great deserts, like the Gobi and
the Taklimakan. But it rains plentifully in the south and along much of
the coasts. As a result, China has erected the most massive water-delivery infrastructure in world history to
shift enormous quantities from south to north, a project already
underway for fifty years and scheduled for completion in another forty.
Linking China’s four main rivers together in a network of diversions,
it will eventually move almost 50 billion cubic meters of water annually.
Although the project has already caused its fair share of negative
environmental consequences and human displacement, most of the Chinese I
have spoken to—even those from regions in which water is taken—are
comfortable with the need for extreme inter-basin transfers to support
northern population centers like Beijing. And they are proud of the
ingenuity and engineering that underwites this aspect of "man-made
China."
Like nearly everything else in China, its history of mind-boggling
human interventions with water began thousands of years ago. I had the
opportunity to explore a classic example last week while visiting the Turpan Depression near
Urumqi in Xinjiang. Turpan is the lowest and hottest place in China,
at 150 meters below sea level and in the middle of China’s most arid
province. And
yet there in the desert was a blooming oasis of vineyards, agriculture,
and Uighur community. How was it possible? It is because 2,000 years
earlier, the people who still live there dug 5,272 kilometers of
underground canals with 172,367 vertical well shafts to collect and
redistribute the groundwater accumulating from melting snow on the
nearby mountains. At its height, the “Turpan Karez”
channeled 858 million cubic meters of water into 1,784 lines to
distribute it to all parts of the region. (You can’t even imagine what
this looks like—best to see it, so try this aerial photo and this diagram). It
is a staggering feat of civilization—a celebration of creativity,
environmentally sustainable terrascaping, and the human ability to
thrive against all odds.
Modern-day Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, relies on similarly
creative water technology. During my visit, I saw acres of recently planted, spindly young trees in
the desert outskirts of the city, lined up like toothpicks piercing the
mostly barren earth. I would often ask my hosts, “How will these trees
take root? With what water?”, and I was always told, “Oh, there is
enough water here in Urumqi.” I
knew that the trees had been planted for environmentally sound
reasons—to help stabilize the soil, moderate ground temperature, and
trap airborne dust—but I still couldn’t understand how they would
survive in such arid ground, only occasionally studded with dwarflike
sagebrush scrub. In my broken Chinese, I would persist, “but if there
were really enough water to grow trees, wouldn’t there already be trees
here?” And they would quietly insist, “no, no—there will be enough
water,” though I could never understand from them why.
Then on my last day, I visited a popular public park in the middle of
the city, where the temperature was ten degrees cooler thanks to the
canopy of the many mature trees that ringed its central hill and the
banks of the creek flowing around it. I followed my idle curiosity to
the crown of the hill, where I was astonished to find a complex
terrascaping system for just this park. There was a small,
swimming-pool like reservoir at the top, supplied by a large pipe
snaking up the hill (it wasn’t clear to me from where), and a network of
canals extending radially outward down the hill in all directions.
Indeed, the park’s oasis was created in the same manner as the Turpan
Karez: decades earlier, the now lush trees had been planted in rings
around the hill, and the reservoir fed them a steady supply of water
through the canals at their base. I
was awed by the success of the project, and the clear joy it gave the
city residents who collected there en masse to enjoy its peace and
beauty. And I suddenly understood what mechanisms were likely helping
those new trees take root in the desert surrounding the city.
With such scarcity at hand, China is trying harder and harder to
avoid squandering its precious water resources with regulatory efforts
targeting both quantity and quality. Wherever there are flush-toilets,
they are almost always low-flush toilets, with separate levers for the
two types of waste they will encounter (one of which needs a stronger
flush than the other). Solar-powered water heaters effectively reduce
consumption by limiting hot water to what can be stored on the roof at
any given time (although the more expensive ones have a gas or electric
backup). Greater efforts are being made to reduce use and recycle water
wherever possible. Hopefully, China will find a way to enact and
enforce more effective water pollution laws to avoid further industrial
and agricultural degradation of its water resources.
But for what it’s worth, I’m told there are no great plans on the
horizon to achieve potability from the tap, because potability is just
not a cultural priority in China. So the mantra will continue: boiled
or bottled, cooked or peeled, rinse at your own risk…
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