Ma Jun

Isabel Hilton, editor of the website China Dialogue has chosen to discuss China’s Water Crisis by Ma Jun on FiveBooks as one of the top five on her subject -China’s Environmental Crisis, saying that:



"...Well, there are several things happening. North China, Beijing, is on the edge of desert and there’s been a huge population growth which is unsustainable. There isn’t enough rainfall to sustain a population, so they’ve been drilling deeper and deeper into the aquifers which are going to be exhausted quite soon.



At the same time, because of poor environmental policies, the Yellow River, the mother river of China and where Chinese civilisation began, now fails to reach the sea for much of the year. This is because of over-extraction, but also because of degradation at the head-waters: deforestation, desertification. So there’s less water coming down it, there’s more water being taken out of it, and the alternative sources – the aquifers – are running out.



And if you add to that uncontrolled industrialisation… Very little of the waste water in China, either industrial or domestic, is treated. They’ve taken the cheapest form of development which has the highest environmental cost. So if you’re pumping raw sewage into the rivers that carry your drinking water, along with industrial effluent, you run out of water. You end up with such water as you do have – which in any event is not enough – being unfit for any purpose whatsoever, as a great deal of water now is in China. You can’t even use it for irrigation..."



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/isabel-hilton-on-chinas-environmental-crisis… (meer)