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Overview

The South-North Water Diversion Project is a multi-decade project undertaken by the People's Republic of China to better utilize water resources available to China. Part of the massive project was brought forward to provide additional water supply for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. While the main task to divert water from the Yangtze River to the Yellow River and Hai River, other spin-off plans are also loosely included. Among these, a plan calling for the capture and diversion of water from Brahmaputra River, located in Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon north of India, has been under study for years. This is because the heavily industrialized Northern China has a much lower rainfall and its rivers are running dry. Already the Yellow River has often gone dry in its lower reaches in recent decades and some of the Hai River tributaries have almost dried out throughout the year.

Eastern Route

The Grand Canal is currently being upgraded. Water from the Yangtze River will be drawn into the canal in Jiangdu City, where a giant 400 m³/s. pumping station was built in the 1980s, and will then be fed uphill by pumping stations along the Grand Canal and through a tunnel under the Yellow River, from where it can flow downhill to reservoirs near Tianjin. Construction on the Eastern Route officially began on December 27, 2002, and water is supposed to reach Tianjin by 2012.

Central Route

The central route is from Danjiangkou Reservoir on Han River, a tributary of the Yangtze River, to Beijing. This route is built on the North China Plain and, once the Yellow River has been crossed, water can flow all the way to Beijing by gravity. The main engineering challenge is to build a tunnel under the Yellow River. Construction on the central route began in 2004. In 2008 the 307 km-long Northern stretch of the central route was completed at a cost of $2 billion. Water in that stretch of the canal does not yet come from the Han River, but from various reservoirs in Hebei Province south of Beijing. Farmers and industries in Hebei had to cut back water consumption to allow for water to be transferred to Beijing. The whole project was expected to be completed around 2010. This has recently been set back to 2014 to allow for more environmental protections to be built. A major difficulty is the resettlement of ~250,000 persons around Danjiangkou Reservoir and along the route. Another problem is the influence on the Han River, where ~1/3 water is diverted. One long-term consideration is to build another canal to divert water from the Three Gorges Dam to Danjiangkou Reservoir.

Western Route

The western route is to divert water from the headwater of the Yangtze River into the headwater of the Yellow River. In order to move the water through the drainage divide between these rivers, huge dams and long tunnels are needed to be built to cross the Tibetan-Qinghai and Western Yunnan Plateaus. The feasiblility of this route is still under study and this project won't start in the near future.

The original plan that began in the 1950s and 60s called for diverting the Nu (Salween), Lancang (Mekong), Tongtian, Yalong, Dadu Rivers into upstream Yellow River. The project was considered too immense and costly to be undertaken at the time. At the present, armed with new technology, feasability studies have been conducted with the plan of connecting the three latter rivers (Tongtian, Yalong, and Dadu, rivers that flow entirely within the borders of China) and diverting them into the Yellow River. Of which, the Tongtian diversion line would be 289 km in length, the Yalong 131 km, and the Dadu 30 km.