Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party.
Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A
new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property
on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex,
the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city's
water table.
“People who are buying apartments aren't thinking about whether
there will be water in the future,” said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried
for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city's dire water situation.
(Yardley 2007)
What is more, available water in China is often very badly polluted
with infectious and parasitic diseases, industrial chemicals, and heavy
metals. Around 700 million Chinese, or more than half of the country's
entire population, consume water containing excessively high levels of
human and animal waste. (Most urban sewage is dumped untreated
directly into lakes and rivers.) Sixty percent of China's rivers and
90 percent of its underground urban water is polluted with sewage
and industrial chemicals, and around 25 percent of China's people
have no access at all to safe drinking water. In 2007 there was so much
toxicalgalbloomfromnearly3,000chemicalfactorieschokingLake
Tai in Jiangsu province, China's third largest freshwater lake, that
two million people in Wuxi city were left without drinking water.
The Huai River in central China is now one of the most polluted rivers
in the world, and an environmentally degraded Huai River basin now
gravely threatens the health and well-being of 150 million people.
Cancer mortality rates in the region are skyrocketing. In Shanxi prov-
ince, arsenic pollution in the water has led to a province-wide out-
break of arsenicosis.
C. Soil and Land
China has over 20 percent of the world's population but only 7 per-
cent of the farmland. What arable land there is has been spectacularly
altered by the hand of man. According to National Geographic's 2008
Atlas of China, “The large population in eastern China has resulted in
one of the most human-altered landscapes in the world, mostly in the
form of agriculture.” (34)
China has one of the most serious soil erosion problems in the world
today. A recent nationwide survey in China found that more than
100 million people in southwest China will lose the land they live on if
soil erosion continues at present rates. Likewise, harvests in northeast
