China’s desperate need for water is forcing the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people

Source: QZ

DANJIANGKOU, CHINA—Once a collection of agrarian villages, Danjiangkou, about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) south of Beijing, is now a small but bustling town. At night, groups dance on a promenade by the river. Inside the town’s only bar, just opened last summer, young men and women eat popcorn and watch a woman in a black leather tank top and mini-skirt sing “Umbrella” by Rihanna.

Its location on the Han River helped give Danjiangkou the seeming good fortune to be chosen as a keystone in China’s solution to a worsening water crisis. Starting next year, about 9.5 billion cubic meters (335.5 billion cubic feet) of water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir will travel from here to over 100 cities—including Beijing—in northern China, where water is scarcer than in the south. Signs in the town proclaim it to be the “fount head” of the central route of the South-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP). The project “is giving Danjiangkou a name,” a young owner of a local restaurant says.

A 30-minute drive out of town, the picture starts to change. In Gangkou village, a tan, middle-aged woman with a round face and jet-black hair sits on a short wooden stool, stitching an image of a lake flanked by two mountains, a landscape that decorates many a Chinese home. Gangkou is one of hundreds of government-designed housing units, and the woman is one of at least 345,000 villagers from Hubei and Henan provinces who have been moved here, out of the way of construction for the water transfer system.

This is the largest relocation in China since the Three Gorges Dam, when over a million people were ordered to move. 

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