Water

1. The first day the water truck came to Xiangshan village, the wells had already been
dry for two months. Throughout the hills flanking the city of Chongqing and
stretching south and west into Guizhou and Sichuan provinces, parts of China this
summer suffered their worst drought in 100 years.

2. In Xiangshan, a tiny mountain village high above the Qi River valley 150 km south
of downtown Chongqing, residents had made do drinking from the muddy
catchments in their fields. But by Aug. 24, when the truck set out on what was
starting to become a routine delivery, those holes too were dry and Xiangshan's
farmers had been forced to give up on irrigation. Pears hung hard and blistered on
the trees. Sunflowers crumpled. The bamboo was brown.

3. Ao Minhong, a truck driver conscripted by the local government, was working long
days. He filled plastic drums on his flatbed from a fire hydrant hooked up to the
river. The Qi was listless that day and the liquid in the drums looked like weak tea.
When he rounded a bend into Xiangshan after an hour's climb, he was mobbed. Li
Caowan, a mother of two, worried the water wasn't clean. But she poured it into a
ceramic tub in her yard anyway. "What choice do we have?" she said. "There's
nothing else to drink."

4. The scene was familiar. In Harbin last November, it was fire engines plying icy
streets lined with people holding buckets. Harbin's water had been contaminated
with benzene from a chemical-plant explosion. In February, the trucks were in
Sichuan, where a power plant discharged a toxic cocktail into the Yuexi River. And
in September, when tap water for 80,000 in Hunan province was cut off because it
had been tainted with an arsenic compound, the trucks saved the day once again.

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5. But water isn't supposed to come on trucks. China's flair for contingency plans isn't
reassuring. Rather, it's one of a growing number of signals that when it comes to
dealing with this most basic of resources, the country is failing. Some 320 million
Chinese lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Deserts cover 27% of the
country's landmass. Most of China's surface water is unfit for human consumption,
and some of that not even clean enough for industrial use.

6. Grain production is sliding. And the Yellow River runs dry so often and so long that
some scientists have argued that it ought to be considered a seasonal phenomenon.
"China's water shortage and pollution problems are more severe than any other large
country in the world," said Qiu Baoxing, Vice Minister of Construction, last month,
"This is a critical point in time. We are at a crossroads."

7. That's the optimistic take; sometimes, though, it seems more like an approaching
dead end. Already China's water woes undercut many of Beijing's most cherished
aspirations: contaminated rivers not only swell health-care costs but increasingly
generate domestic unrest. Continued droughts sap power supplies; ruin farmers and
will eventually mean competition with other nations for grain.

8. Moreover, providing citizens with the one precious resource that really does just fall
from the sky is among the most fundamental duties we expect developed nations to
perform. If China is to continue toward its goals of economic prosperity, social
stability and stronger relations with the rest of the world, it will need to do better—
and fast.