Yahoo News 18 Sep 08;
Emergency water started flowing to Beijing Thursday as a six-month scheme kicked off to keep the city of 17 million from running out of the resource, the government said.
Some 300 million cubic metres (10.6 billion cubic feet) of water will be redirected from Hebei province, which surrounds the capital, the state's government said.
Hebei also suffers severely from a lack of water, and the fact that it must pass on the scarce resource is testimony to Beijing's political clout, experts say.
The water will flow along a newly-dug 305-kilometre (190-mile) canal stretching from the Hebei capital of Shijiazhuang to Beijing and fed by three major reservoirs, a statement on the Hebei water resources department website said.
"The transfer of emergency water to the capital Beijing is a politically important issue of major significance to the economy of our province," the statement said.
The transfer was ordered by the State Council, China's cabinet, the Hebei government said.
According to official figures, Beijing's average water use was about 9.4 million cubic metres a day in 2005, meaning the transfer, when completed, will be equal to about a month of supply.
The canal is the northern part of China's ambitious North-South Water Diversion Project, a multi-billion dollar scheme to bring water from the nation's longest river, the Yangtze, to the parched north.
According to Xinhua, Beijing and the surrounding region, including most of Hebei, has suffered droughts every year since 1999.
Increased rainfall this summer has partly alleviated the crisis, it said, while also allowing the three reservoirs in Hebei to amass about 1.33 billion cubic metres of water.
Xinhua said that by 2010, when more of the north-south water diversion project is completed, up to one billion cubic metres of water will be diverted to Beijing annually mostly from the Yangtze.
