in one of our most recent videos we discussed a mega project spearheaded by China that ran a likely risk of disaster due to the threat posed by it in part by the Unstoppable force of nature amidst the islands to which it lays claims in the South China Sea China has been dredging and building man-made seab be platforms intended to fit its economic and strategic objectives those islands however are crummy they're built on shaky foundations and they're vulnerable to submersion by unruly elements of the sea as well as climate change but it seems that China has
responded to these challenges with the following Outlook it may be impossible to overcome nature but we're going to try anyway look China is a vast country with Rich natural resources Bountiful terrain and loads of other natural features however given its vast size some of its territory is decidedly less hospitable for human habitation than others despite this as most people know China is a huge population and due to routine state-driven reconfiguration of its population centers many people Liv in areas not well serviced by Necessities such as water and fertile plots of land and while the south
of China is relatively rich in both the Arid North is subject to desertification where difficult conditions come at a cost to both the livelihoods and living standards of the population this has led to deaths by drought in the past and the shortage of water supply even risks upending some of China's major industries which rely on a consistent supply of hydroelectricity for their continued operation so China decided decided to remedy this problem by creating a complex network of artificial Waterworks effectively saying to hell with it let's provide a new River to remedy all of these problems
but as with other Chinese Mega projects playing with Mother Nature could be a bit of a dangerous tactic so let's [Music] explore a lot of China's 20th century history was punctuated by drastic economic changes intended to trans formed the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized socialist Powerhouse however it did so at a catastrophic cost to human life not to mention one of the worst famines in history the Great Leap Forward was a testament to this spearheaded by its leader chairman ma the initiative sought to transform Chinese Society entirely in the 1950s and 60s
in order to consolidate and reorganize its vast population the PRC developed intense methods of industrialization focused on exploiting China's huge Manpower rather the making use of modern machines and capital expenditure the plan as it was hoped was to circumnavigate the slow process of industrialization by exploiting this giant labor force instead the greatly forward was therefore epitomized by experimental ideas like the development of small backyard steel furnaces in every village and urban neighborhood to allow workers to individually accelerate the industrialization process it also featured a commune system where peasants were organized into teams with kitchens set
up so that women could be freed also to work China's demographic centers were transformed with laborers moved from farms to Coal faces at the government's insistence and population centers exploding in urban areas across China but the Great Leap Forward was anything but a Success Through the mass nationalization of arable lands many agriculturalists lost everything and much livestock was lost to slaughter and disillusioned peasants whose entire Lively was now in the hands of the government it resulted in a sharp contraction of the Chinese economy and millions of deaths by starvation execution torture forced labor and suicide
other elements that were out against the plan were a series of natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet support consecutive years of natural calamities accelerated what quickly turned into a national Calamity in only 3 years at the height of the plan around 20 million people are thought to have died of starvation and all told it's likely that between 30 to 45 million Chinese lives were lost due to all of the consequences resulting from the implementation of the plan it Remains the single largest non-w wartime loss of human life in history but with the PRC being
the PRC the objective was seen as having been fulfilled and the chaotic rearrangement of the lives of China's population was greenlit for the future the Great Leap Forward was followed up by a new experiment of measure which began in the 1960s known as the up to the mountains and down to the countryside movement the aim of this campaign was to redress the lopsided saturation of workers in the overburdened Chinese cities by forcing people raised in the cities to relocate to rural areas supposedly to experience life with the peasantry and to discard their Bourgeois ideas more
than 16 million young Chinese were moved to mountain regions Frontier towns and Collective farmlands most of them were recent graduates from high school and many were political undesirable such as members of the Ed Guard youth movement which maard started at schools and universities only a few years before and quickly gotten tired of most of these remained in their unexpected new homes for the rest of their lives leading to the generation being referred to as China's stolen generation and well this all leads us to [Music] today the idea of just inventing a water project to service
the Arid region of China's North and Northeast also actually originated with ma first proposed in 1952 perhaps because of the destructive Legacy of the Great Leap Forward the project did take a bit of time some 50 years to be put into action but it did eventually begin in 2002 and adopted the title of the south north water transfer project as mentioned before China's Southern regions are relatively well irrigated and have no great shortage of water this is also where the majority of China's population lives you may have seen this map before referred to as the
who line The Who line while imaginary helps to graph the vast demographic imbalance between the East and southeast of China home to 94% of its population and the remaining hland is where the other 6% live although drawn up almost a 100 years ago the line largely remains as true today as it did then as the population east of the map have dramatically increased since the map was devised by geographer hu hang Yong in 19 35 however that doesn't mean that nobody lives west of the line given China's massive population 6% of the population still means
Millions upon millions of people living in its westernmost regions in part due to campaigns such as the down to the countryside movement large population centers appeared even in isolated regions of the west and southwest and while still decidedly less than in the East the population of these areas Rose in tandem with the rest of China moreover it stands worthy of mention that some of the regions which are low on water and therefore in need of Greater Supply are actually located east of H line as noted by the Wilson Center one such region is the North
China plane which is anything but underpopulated and which is home to China's capital city Beijing the North China plane is perfectly fertile but it's subject to unpredictable weather which can lead to Drought despite having around 2third of China's total cropland and around 40% of its population northern China only had around 14% of the country's total water Supply or in the water transfer project got off the ground in 2006 moreover due to the nature of the Soul there it requires a lot of irrigation due to its low water productivity simply put more water is needed to
create one unit of agricultural yield than in the southern regions High pollution has also contaminated some of the reservoirs and this means that a consistent supply of fresh water is needed to meet China's industrial objectives in short to resolve the great demand for water that Eastern China needs and to give Western China the water necessary for survival a solution was needed and so it was decided to put Ma's rather mad plan into action to create a complex network of sources that could solve the most pressing water related [Music] issues now mostly complete the south north
water transfer project is a truly Monumental undertaking uniting China's four main rivers the yangzi yellow haahi and Hai rivers and redirecting water along three canals the eastern central and Western routes the Eastern route takes water from the lower reaches of the yangi river by Canal to the North China Plaine including the provinces of yangu ani and Shandong and the major city of tianin the volume of water provided is intended to meet the needs of agricultural and Industrial sectors in all of these areas in addition the extra water flowing through the canal will make it navigable
throughout the year providing further benefit to the economic activity of the Northern Region the central route carries water from a reservoir on the Han River in the center of China to several nearby regions Hub henan and this is by some margin the most crucial of the three routes as its water flow Will Serve by far the most people and two of China's most major cities Beijing and tanging the route has been designed so that water will move from its source to its endpoint by gravity alone although a major engineering challenge facing the project has been
to increase the storage capacity and height of the dang Jang cold Dam from its original 157 M to 170 and in a striking display of China's engineering muscle the eastern and Central routs run by tunnel directly under the Yellow River both projects are now largely complete with the Eastern routs waterf flow reaching tan Jing on China's eastern coast in 2017 and the central route having been largely finished with the exception of several planned expansions 3 years earlier in 2014 but it is the Western route which is perhaps the most ambitious and the least well of
its intention is to provide much needed Waterworks to China's relatively underpopulated regions in the Northwest including shinjang and Ching High the project involves sending flows of water around 500 km from the Ching High to plateau in the south over a mountain range known as bangala it is simultaneously intended to help replenish the Yellow River which in turn is used for the Eastern route and to provide not only irrigation for millions of hectares of arable land in western China but also Al to meet the demands of urban industrial and energy development in the region the thing
is this project is by far the bumpiest and it's not really clear how any of this is going to be accomplished without at least a massive cost of the Ecology of the affected regions as well as to China's Foreign Relations as we shall see a little bit [Music] later now admittedly the south north water transfer project has for the most most part been a general success and no major environmental disasters have been reported yet certainly there have not been reports of a failure comparable with other Chinese projects which sought to fly in the face of
nature with little regard for the environment or population safety but that doesn't mean it's come without any problems for one thing the three root project has come with a huge bill 62 billion dollar this makes the project twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam although given the scale of objective this is actually pretty understandable certainly it seems money better spent than the suspected 13 billion that China threw at just one of its struggling man-made islands in the South China Sea but even so there is a risk that if the project doesn't meet its objectives
in full this will have been a hefty chunk of money down the drain in this place quite literally and since the canal has been in part financed by local administrations in the region they service some local officials have bulked at the Steep cost to Regional coffers and even been argued for compensation because of the ecological Services they need to implement for the canals to function The Hub region sight of the dam responsible for the water of the central route is likely to see its revenues diminish significantly since the decreased water flow it can benefit from
impacts its ability to exploit valuable mineral resources in the region and all this is not to speak of the roughly 300,000 people from Hub and surrounding provinces who've had to be displaced by the project further impacting General economic activity in addition the same route carries water from the south to some parts of the north but while the South has plenty of water this doesn't necessarily make it very clean water schistosomiasis disease caused by parasitic worms remains a significant fear and although water treatment plants are part of the projects design some scientists doubt they will be
effective in containing this and other waterborne health risks foreseeable in the transfer between regions but the biggest problem by some margin is the heavy environmental impact likely to result from the project something which has even resulted in some careful criticism within China itself the construction process of the canals poses potentially serious harm to the regions in which the canals have been built through saltwater intrusion and resulting habitat destruction the Project's impact on Wetlands also has raised similar concerns as reduced river flows will slow the deposit of sediments that are critical to Wetland formation meaning that
these could become arid and dry and although the aim of supplying water to some parched areas of China will probably be accompl lished the redirection of water from existing Rivers May potentially lead to the same problem arising for populations elsewhere the yangi river now the source of the Eastern root canal suffered an unprecedented drought in 2022 imperiling the ability of some Chinese cities to maintain power even the Yellow River the main River of Northern China has dried up every year since 1985 something which will only be remedied if the ambitious Western route does actually come
into being some other rivers especially minor tributaries have already seen their water sources reduced to the extent that they have completely dried up as many as half of China's 50,000 Rivers have disappeared over the past two decades and much of the rest are heavily polluted this is no doubt coming a great expense to smaller industrial regions and to the Flora and FAA in China's Countryside it's also thought by some that the project even if successful in its early stages just isn't sustainable key B Singh a former Vice Minister of Housing and Urban rural development in
China has pointed to high monetary costs of Maintenance and spread of pollution through the waterways which includes some of the most densely packed areas of China's principal Northern cities and in addition the two completed routs will probably remedy its problem only in Za far as China's population doesn't rapidly grow in the near future as it has done at several points in its history more people require more crops more crops require more water and more water means further expansion of the project and so on in short the sustainability of this project to meet the massive water
demand for China to keep running could be a key question in years to come now while the eastern and Central routes are now even after many years of work and eye watering expense now complete it is the third route in the west over which a question mark hangs you see as we explained in a previous video on this topic the completed first two routes don't really require that much structural inventiveness they mostly require sound civil engineering and construction capabilities as well as the sacrifice of a lot of ecological systems something which China has proven itself
more than willing to do in the past but unlike the previous two the third route shall require a very creative structural approach to achieve success given the massive amount of grounds which must be covered by the new Waterworks in order to meet its objective and the Western route is far from complete much of it hasn't even started construction and that's partly because the scale of the project is absolutely huge it makes it a Monumental challenge the focal point of the project is the development of a new artificial River hilariously to the english- speaking era at
least known as the red flag River the red flag river is intended to BU water towards the isolated region of shin Jang and other areas of Northwest China this will be accomplished by diverting around 60 billion cubic meters of water per year from the major rivers of the ecologically fragile Ching High Tibet Plateau despite the double onra its name the red flag river water transfer project actually derives its name from a canal in Eastern China known as the red flag Canal due to a prominent red PRC flag ostentatiously draped over its mouth the red flag
Canal was a much celebrated feat of Chinese engineering constructed in the 1960s as a 70 km long Waterway servicing isolated villages in the North China plane the project was a success and is been expanded to over 1500 km in length while continuing to help irrigate The Villages and farmers land of the region interestingly the new project despite its scale has not received the same level of fanfare as the eastern and Central routs of the south north water transfer project this may be deliberate for one thing there is little guarantee of success with this initiative and
its intended date of completion is still a long time away being slated for completion in 2050 and when it comes to Red Flag River Project there are several problems not only is it sheer scale which will involve artificially creating a river to span effectively half of the length of ch but also because of what else that distance will entail the vast expanse of land in between the source and the destination encompasses practically the full variety of China's very diverse topography from mountains and plateaus to deserts and basins at least part of the red flag River
will have to pass through both the GOI and tlam Maran deserts as well as cross the barala mountains and given this ruggedness workers will have to construct much of the project in isolated areas without much nearby infrastructure and without much Financial or material support from local administrations moreover once again the environmental factor is an issue since the source of the Ching High Tibet Plateau is an ecological area which is already highly fragile and where any disruption caused by a change in the water supply could be severe but in addition to those problems the Diplomatic disputes
which may arise could be similarly severe you see the redirection of water from the plateau will almost certainly reduce the water flow of several Rivers which currently rely on it the trouble is three of these are transnational Rivers the Mong which flows from China southwards into Mama Lao Thailand Cambodia and Vietnam the saen which also runs into Thailand and Myanmar and the brahmaputra which flows from the Tibetan Plateau through the Himalayas into India and ultimately Bangladesh and while the project is likely to come at an ecological cost at each of these Rivers it is the
question of the Bap Putra which raises the most risks of a diplomatic upset at 3,000 km in length the Brahma Putra is an important river for irrigation and transportation for India and Bangladesh and millions of people in both countries are directly dependent on it India has therefore reacted to any Chinese plans to meddle with the river with great concern and India's prime minister reportedly raised the issue to China's leadership during a visit to Beijing in 2008 after the plans for the Western route had been revealed it appeared not long after that China had perhaps relented
on this part of the plan with Premier W jbo and announcing during his visit to India in 2010 that China would take into account Downstream interests in their plans for the Brahma Putra Basin however talks between both Nations not really taken off on the matter since and the building of the red flag River has continued undeterred China and India have also sparred on other fronts in the time since especially in contested regions of the Himalayas where hand-to-hand fighting between Chinese and Indian soldiers resulted in dozens of deaths in 2020 and 2021 what this could mean
for International Security and the relations between two neighboring powerhouses is something that could lead to uncomfortable questions in the future a red flag in name a red flag by Nature [Music] [Applause] [Music]
