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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (519)	8/26/2003 11:51:24 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

The death of China's rivers By Jasper Becker PART 1 China at the dawn of history was much warmer and wetter than it is today, with elephants, rhinoceroses and crocodiles living north of the Yangtze River. Five or six thousand years of cutting forests and draining marshes have changed the climate to the point where the landscape has been devastated. China has the highest ratio of actual to potential desertified land in the world, according to the World Bank. The accelerating speed of that environmental change is most evident in the Yellow River, the heart of Han Chinese civilization. The river has virtually disappeared. Now, in what may be the biggest water-diversion plan in history, China will build a canal north from the Three Gorges Dam that ultimately will tunnel under the Yellow River to bring water to dry northern areas of China. The US$50 billion south-to-north water diversion scheme will require the resettlement of up to 400,000 peasants along the three possible routes. Already 1.8 million have been resettled along the banks of the Yangtze itself. China today is finding itself in the middle of schizophrenic attempts to do two opposing things at once. On the one hand, it is in the middle of by far the biggest water-diversion plan in history, of which the massive Three Gorges project, which will impound 600 kilometers of water reaching nearly from Wuhan to Chongqing, is only a part. At the same time, officials appear to have finally become aware of the environmental depredation China faces, and the damage that dams cause, and are frantically stopping farming and resettling villagers to plant forest in an effort to halt desertification and flood damage on denuded hills. atimes.com PART 2 Peasants bear the brunt of China's energy plans By Jasper Becker atimes.com