Southwest China is currently in the grips of a terrible drought. For the past month, the Sichuan province and Chongqing Municipality have withered in hot temperatures and no rain, with no end in sight. 18 million people have been affected; 665,000 hectares of cropland have been destroyed in just three months; the Yangtze River has dropped to 3.5 meters, the lowest in a century.¹ And yet, as dire as this situation is, it is only a local facet of a much deeper water crisis that the world’s most populous country currently faces.

In rural areas, the situation is grimmer. More than 300 million people in rural areas are short of clean drinking water and pollution is so severe that the Ministry of Water Resources estimates 40 percent of water in the country’s 1,300 or so major rivers is fit only for industrial or agricultural use.

The Ministry’s 2003 report revealed that the water condition in 70 percent of cities along the Yellow River failed to meet the healthy standard while only two lakes out of 11 in the Yangtze River drainage basin meet water quality standards.²

China’s economic boom has worried Western observers, but it is entirely an urban phenomenon. Two-thirds of the country’s population of 1.3 billion—over ¹/₆ of the world’s total population—is rural. To achieve its “economic miracle,” China has largely sacrificed its countryside.

By contrast, the countryside, home to two-thirds of China’s population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Refineries and smelters forced out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign companies, to escape regulation at home.

The losers are hundreds of millions of peasants already at the bottom of a society now sharply divided between rich and poor. They are farmers and fishermen who depend on land and water for their basic existence.³

What is largely unrecognized outside of China is that the feared eastern power is, in fact, on the brink of revolt, due to the disparities between the urban elite and the rural poor.^{4, 5, 6} In fact, Beijing’s hold on its country has already been bought by compromises with complexity:

Beijing’s tenuous grasp on its provinces is as much a function of history as of deliberate planning. When Deng Xiaoping unleashed the country’s economic reforms in 1979, he loosened the Communist Party’s control and allowed local governments to pursue their own economic models. The competition, he believed, would breed high growth rates—and he was right. But there were unintended consequences. Today, China is one of the only countries that puts the responsibility for funding health care, social security and education in local governments’ hands.⁷

Corruption (another cost of complexity) has proven as powerful as bureaucracy in bogging down China’s ability to provide for the basic needs of its citizens. Meanwhile, the Chinese government recognizes the threat that this growing resentment represents to their survival, but their efforts to destroy the revolt have only strengthened it.

Any effort to organize for political purposes attracts suspicion and, often, repression. While Beijing admits that more than 80% of the demands raised by protesters in so-called “collective incidents” are lawful or reasonable, officials at all levels are united in showing no tolerance for protest leaders, labeling them “bad elements,” “thuggish idlers,” “individuals with ulterior motives,” even “agents of overseas anti-China forces.”

Most rural folk have a very different take, regarding protest leaders as heroic representatives deserving of support and protection. Yet even when challenging unlawful local decisions, protest leaders are harshly reminded that they have no right to represent their constituents: they are fined, beaten up, detained, sent to labor education camps, or imprisoned. But repression, either by the police or hired local thugs, generates even stronger popular support for protest leaders. And after a crackdown, the protest organizers often feel they have no choice but to make a bigger ruckus. This cycle of repression spurring escalation is the key reason for the explosion of large-scale incidents.⁸

The reasons for this stand-off are many, but one key element is water. “All the water we drink around here is polluted,” one village Party leader said. “You can taste it. It’s acrid and bitter. Now the victims are starting to come out, people dying of cancer and tumors and unusual causes.” The daughter of one farmer, now dying from cancer because of the pollution of the water, said, “The water in the river used to be clean, but now it’s black and changing colors all the time. The water is being destroyed.”

In July and August, officials measured an 82-mile band of polluted water moving through the Huai basin. China rates its waterways on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being too toxic even to touch. This water was rated 5. For fishermen, it may as well have been poison. “If I had wanted to, I could have gone on the river and filled a boat with dead fish,” said Song Dexi, 64, a fisherman in Yumin. “It was smelly, like toilet water. All our fish and shrimp died. We don’t have anything to live on now.”⁹

Most of China’s water supply, though—70% of its total population (90% for the cities), and 40% of its irrigation—comes from underground sources. According to China’s environmental bureau, “A survey showed that underground water in 90 percent of Chinese cities has been polluted by organic and inorganic pollutants, and there are signs that [it] is spreading.”¹⁰

Recently, China has been forced to impose rules and rationing along the Yellow River.¹¹

According to hydrologists, government officers and industrial leaders, water and waste pollution is the single most serious issue facing China. Presently, one in three rural inhabitants lacks access to safe drinking water. The urban situation is not any more heartening. More than a hundred large cities are short of water and half are considered to be seriously threatened by the shortage. In the northern region of the country, the water table has dropped more than a meter. Even in the capital city of Beijing, the water supply per individual is only 300 cubic meters (66,000 gallons) per year. The country’s water resources are among the lowest in the world per capita and concentrated in the south, so that the north and the west experience regular droughts. …

Another significant source of problems compounding the water crisis is drought. Increasing in both frequency and duration, China has been hit hard in the past decade. Droughts once relegated almost exclusively to northern China are now becoming more common in the once lush south. In the traditionally prosperous southern Guangdong province for example, which is home to 110 million people, there was a 40 percent drop in rainfall this year. 2000 proved to be one of the worst years in decades in terms of drought. Beijing was hit be 11 sandstorms in that year, a telling and sobering sign of encroaching and increasing desertification. In Guangdong, 74 reservoirs have dried up and rivers have been reduced to trickles. There was more than a 10 percent decline in that year’s grain yield because of the droughts. …

Pollution is another huge problem contributing to the larger crisis at hand. Over half of China’s population, about 700 million people and 11 percent of the world’s, only have access to drinking water of a quality below World Health Organization standards (WHO). The water is contaminated by a combination of industrial pollution and human and animal waste. The lack of clean water for animals creates the threat of disease as livestock take in all types of pollutants and microbes.¹²

The drought currently devastating southwest China is but a harbinger of things to come. Drought is already endemic to northern China, home to 40% of China’s population. Bureaucratic mismanagement, industrial pollution, and the sheer economic toll of such an overpopulated country (and the agriculture required to support such a population) creates a crisis that simply cannot be averted. If China raises the price of water to realistic levels, it will likely face severe reprecussions; if it does not, it will face a major water crisis. Already, China is well on the road to dissolution, revolt, and collapse. It faces a major water crisis in the coming decades that it is severely unlikely to answer in any productive way. The result will be the collapse of the Middle Kingdom.