China, Tibet, and the Strategic Power of Water

May 8, 2008/in China, Climate Change, Hydropower, India, Pacific, South

Asia, Water News/by Circle of Blue
Pollution and global warming threaten Asia’s most important freshwater
source
Circle of Blue reports on a crucial but little-known factor in China-Tibet debate

https://www.circleofblue.org/2008/world/china-tibet-and-the-strategic-power-
of-water/

By Keith Schneider and C. T. Pope

© 2008 Circle of Blue
Almost two years after a 710-mile (1,100 kilometer) railroad across the
world’s highest plateau opened from central China to the Tibetan capital of
Lhasa, the deadliest clashes in a generation are occurring between Chinese
police and young Tibetan protestors. The fierce fighting, which erupted in
March, has produced casualties on both sides and prompted demonstrations
around the world. Many analysts assert that the fighting is caused, at least in
part, by fear that the Chinese government’s long-standing strategy to open
Tibet’s vast reserves of copper, iron, lead, zinc, and other minerals will
accelerate with the railroad’s development.
But a number of influential scientists and experts in Asian studies now say
that control and management of an even more vital resource – the Tibetan
Plateau’s vast supply of fresh water – is also emerging at the center of the
increasingly tense political and cultural strife between China and Tibet.
Reservoir at top of the world is retreating
The Tibetan Plateau is an oxygen-scarce landscape of enormous glaciers,
huge alpine lakes, and mighty waterfalls – a storehouse of freshwater so
bountiful that the region serves as the headwaters for many of Asia’s largest
rivers, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and
Sutlej, among others. According to studies by the United Nations and several
prominent global environmental organizations, almost half of the world’s
population lives in the watersheds of the rivers whose sources lie on the
Tibetan Plateau.
However, recent studies – including several by the Chinese Academy of
Sciences – have documented a host of serious environmental challenges to
the quantity and quality of Tibet’s freshwater reserves, most of them caused
by industrial activities. Deforestation has led to large-scale erosion and
siltation. Mining, manufacturing, and other human activities are producing
record levels of air and water pollution in Tibet. Together, these factors
portend future water scarcity that could add to the region’s volatility.
Most important, the region’s warming climate is causing glaciers to recede at
a rate faster than anywhere else in the world, and in some regions of Tibet by
three feet (.9 meters) per year, according to a report in May 2007 by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The quickening melting
and evaporation is raising serious concerns in scientific and diplomatic
communities, in and outside China, about Tibet’s historic capacity to store
more freshwater than anyplace on earth, except the North and South Poles.
Tibet’s water resources, they say, have become an increasingly crucial
strategic political and cultural element that the Chinese are intent on
managing and controlling.
“At least 500 million people in Asia and 250 million people in China are at risk
from declining glacial flows on the Tibetan Plateau,” said Rajendra K.
Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and
winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, in an interview with Circle of Blue.
“This is one of the great concerns – a staggering number of people will be
affected in the near future. There aren’t too many researchers who have
looked at this water situation and its far-reaching impacts.”
China among driest nations
With more than a quarter of its land classified as desert, China is one of the
planet’s most arid regions. Beijing is besieged each spring by raging dust
storms born in Inner Mongolia, where hundreds of square miles of grasslands
are turning to desert each year. In other parts of the nation, say diplomats
and economic development specialists, Chinese rivers are either too polluted
or too filled with silt to provide all of China’s 1.3 billion people with adequate
supplies of freshwater.
Chinese authorities have long had their eyes on Tibet’s water resources.
They have proposed building dams for hydropower and spending billions of
dollars to build a system of canals to tap water from the Himalayan snowmelt
and glaciers and transport it hundreds of miles north and east to the country’s
farm and industrial regions.
But how long that frozen reservoir will last is in doubt. In attempting to solve
its own water crisis, China could potentially create widespread water
shortages among its neighbors. The IPCC warned a year ago that the
glaciers in the world’s highest mountain range could vanish within three
decades. “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part
of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them
disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth
keeps getting warmer at the current rate,” the report said.
“While the political issues swirling around Tibet and China are complex, there
is no denying that water plays a role in China’s interest in the region,” said
Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland,
California and one of the world’s foremost authorities on water. “The water of
Tibet may prove to be one of its most important resources in the long run –
for China, and for much of southern Asia. Figuring out how to sustainably
manage that water will be a key to reducing political conflicts and tensions in
the region.”
A long struggle gets worse
Tibet lies north of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar, west of China, and
south of East Turkistan. The highest and largest plateau on Earth, it stretches
some 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from east to west, and 900 miles (1,448
kilometers) north to south, an area equivalent in size to the United States
region east of the Mississippi River. The Himalayas form much of its southern
boundary, and Tibet’s average altitude is so high – 11,000 feet (3,350
kilometers) above sea level – that visitors often need weeks to acclimate.

Though Tibet and China disagree about some

details, the modern conflict between the two nations began in 1950 when
China invaded Tibet with 40,000 troops, and a year later seized control of
Lhasa. Bloody clashes have broken out between Chinese forces and
Tibetans periodically since then, with particularly fierce street fighting in the
1980s, and again this spring. The new protests have attracted global
attention, in large part because they are occurring just months before China
hosts the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
The Tibetan Government in Exile, which settled in India in 1959 following the
Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet, in recent years has consistently identified the
plateau’s water as a strategic resource and criticized China’s management of
it. In a report earlier this decade, the exile government said China’s water
development plans, as well as global climate change, should cause concern
across Asia, because it would “seriously decrease [the] water supplies of
India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma, as well
as the Yangtze River Basin as far as Shanghai, especially in drought years.
Meanwhile, rural Tibetans continue to suffer high rates of hepatitis, water-
borne infections, and back pain due to inadequate village water supplies.”
China quietly acknowledges water tension
The Chinese government, in its studies, acknowledges the changing
condition of Tibet’s water supply. Last summer, the Institute of Tibetan
Plateau Research, a unit of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported that
the area and mass of the region’s glaciers had decreased 7 percent since the
late 1960s. The Chinese scientists reported that the melting phenomenon
was widespread, though it was not known how many of China’s 46,298
glaciers were affected.
The short-term consequence of the receding glaciers, which the scientists
said was due to global climate change, was that runoff in some rivers had
increased. But because of the deepening dry conditions of western China, the
water was evaporating before it could be used.
The Chinese study offered no recommendations for reversing the melting or
better managing the Tibetan Plateau’s water. Nor was there any discussion of
the Chinese government’s role in overseeing it. And while most scientists in
the region agree that the Tibetan Plateau’s water resources are crucial to the
future of China and Southern Asia, many declined to be interviewed for fear
of losing access to their research sites.
Elizabeth Economy, the director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, said it’s not surprising that China is circumspect about
the strategic consequences of the Tibetan Plateau’s freshwater supplies.
“Talking about this, or introducing it into any of their conversation about Tibet,
just doesn’t serve their purpose,” she explained in an interview.
According to Economy, control of water resources in the Tibetan Plateau
might be an issue internally, but externally, it is not. “China wants to minimize
the range of issues it needs to negotiate. Once this issue of water resources
comes up, and it seems inevitable at this point that it will, it also raises
emerging conflicts with India and Southeast Asia. They also receive their
water from the Tibetan Plateau,” Economy said.
The new China-Tibet Railroad, built at a cost of roughly $4 billion, crosses
terrain that illustrates China’s water dilemma – dry high plains, teeming cities
that are growing rapidly, lakes that are drying up, and glaciers that are
retreating into rocky and impassable mountain ranges.
“Water is seen as a strategic asset for China wherever it occurs in China,”
said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security
Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in
Washington, D.C. “Because so much of the water for China and the region
originates in Tibet, it adds an additional level of importance and political
sensitivity and context that does not get the attention it deserves.”
Summing up the volatile situation, Dabelko added, “Nearly two billion people
are dependent on water originating on the Tibetan Plateau. By definition, that
makes it high politics and critically important in a politically strategic sense.”
[Hear and Read the entire interview with Geoff Dabelko here]
Keith Schneider, a noted environmental journalist and former New York
Times national correspondent, is Circle of Blue’s writer in residence. Contact
Keith Schneider

Facts:
 An estimated 70 percent of China’s rivers are polluted, leaving an
estimated 300 million people with limited access to clean water.
 Almost half of the world’s population lives in the watersheds of the
rivers whose sources lie on the Tibetan Plateau.
 Scientists say glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau are receding faster than
in any other part of the world — if the rate continues, most will gone by
2035.
 There are more than 1000 lakes on the Tibetan Plateau, including the
world’s highest salt lake — Namtso (Nam Co).
 Both sourced in the Tibetan Plateau, the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) River
and the Yellow River serve roughly 520 million people in China.
 The Yangtze River is the third-longest in the world, after the Amazon
and the Nile.
Additional Resources:
[flv:himalaya.flv 580 326]Video courtesy of nasa.gov
Tibet Resources Links:
CIA Factbook — ChinaThe Pacific Institute
National Geographic — Tibet
Water and Conflict (from the Pacific Institute)
Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (English)
Official Website of the Tibetan Government in Exile
Tibet 2000: Environment and Development Issues
The Council of Foreign Relations — The Question of Tibet
World Water Assessment Program — UN
The Mekong River Commission
Tibet: Facts and Figures from China.org
NASA Flyover of the Himalayas
China taps Tibetan waters — International Herald Tribune
Yellow River: A Journey Through China — National Public Radio
Bitter Waters — Yellow River Photo Story, National Geographic
A Melting Glacier in Tibet Serves as an Example and a Warning –NYTimes
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change – CNA
Interview with Geoff Dabelko, talking water and environmental peacemaking
in China, Tibet and Darfur
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars – Waterstories
Other Water Conflicts:
UNICEF – Darfur OverviewA Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse? – NYTimes