Yellow River - RIVER OF CONSTANT SORROW (Excerpts from News China, Part I)

At 5,464 kilometers in length, the Yellow River contains only two percent of China’s water resources, yet provides water for 12 percent of China’s 1.3 billion population, irrigates 15 percent of its farmland and generates about 14 percent of its GDP. “The Yellow River lacks water resources, and the water supply currently drawn from the river is beyond its capacity,” said Chen Xiaojiang, director of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC) of the Ministry of Water Resources in March this year.

The river runs through nine provinces and autonomous regions and empties into the Bohai Bay off the coast of east China’s Shandong Province. For a period in 1972, it failed for the first time to reach the sea, and flow interruptions have regularly been observed since 1987. The annual frequency of “dry days” reached a peak at 226 days for a 704-kilometer section of river in Shandong in 1997. In 1998, the National Development and Reform Commission (formerly the State Development Planning Commission) and the Ministry of Water Resources issued annual water-use quotas and a distribution scheme for the river. These management policies determined total water withdrawals on the basis of hydrology, the need for sediment transport and other ecological factors, and established annual provincial water withdrawals including a seasonal distribution plan for greater withdrawal in the rainy season than in the dry season.

With the authorization of the State Council, YRCC acts as the sole administrator for the allocation of the Yellow River water supply to the nine provinces and autonomous regions through which it flows. In March 1999, the Commission issued the first water withdrawal quota directive and started the water withdrawal control plan for the whole basin. This policy was extended from the main Yellow River to its tributaries in 2006.

According to planning information provided to NewsChina by YRCC, the river's annual water resources that can be tapped is 58 billion cubic meters, and 37 billion cubic meters are allocated to the nine provinces and autonomous regions, with the remaining 21 billion earmarked to wash away silt in the river. The quota for each province and autonomous region is based on their population, economic structure and water demand. A trade in water use rights between various sectors has sprung up in some provinces.

Implementation of these policies has ensured uninterrupted flow of the river to the sea for 14 consecutive years since 2000 and improved the water resource and ecological health of the whole basin. Ecosystem integrity and biological diversity have improved greatly.