Adding to the problem is the fact that coal mining is a water-intensive as well as polluting process, and 85% of coal reserves in China are located in provinces where water is scarce and must be shared with a large agriculture industry.

Under Xi Jinping’s administration, Beijing, Tianjin, and the surrounding province of Hebei have developed significantly. Violence in Nagorno-Karabakh: a New Proxy War in the South Caucasus? The goal, as China has so clearly pointed out, should be to create a global ecological civilization. In some cities, the various companies are under the same "parent bureau", which may be the construction bureau or a water bureau, while in other cities the water bureau and the wastewater bureau report to different parent bureaus. This financing structure causes poor rural areas to "accurately match their ability to pay with the proper type of systems and level of service", i.e. According to the authors of the NASA study, “It is important to understand where existing socio-economic tensions may collide with water stress to produce stress-driven conflicts.” In China, the desire for economic growth has long conflicted with environmental protection and public health; crisis-level air pollution is a continuous reminder of this. According to the World Bank, China differs from many other developing countries in that there is not a history of the central government providing large subsidies for the financing of rural water supply and sanitation. But no amount of drinking water will help China if it totally unusable due to pollution. Progress in rural areas appears to lag behind what has been achieved in urban areas. It's an idea borrowed from Chairman Mao Zedong, the strongman founder of the People's Republic. As China moves rapidly away from staple food self-sufficiency, the globalisation of China’s water-security crisis is a serious issue. © Copyright 2020 Asia & the Pacific Policy Society.

Challenges require immediate policy action, Environment & energy, Government and governance, Food & water | Asia, East Asia, The World. Some important policy papers it has issued are “Accelerating the Marketization of Public Utilities” (No.272 Policy Paper of the MOC, 2002), the “Measure on Public Utilities Concession Management” (No.126 Policy Paper of the MOC, 2004), and the “Opinions on Strengthening Regulation of Public Utilities” (No.154 Policy Paper of the MOC, 2005). In coastal areas near Beijing, restrictions on extraction of groundwater for industrial use have been adopted to force desalination into the supply portfolio, but desalinated water has not been incorporated systematically into China’s municipal water systems. Municipal governments provide their financing in the form of equity that typically is not remunerated. Photojournalist Huo Daishan told CNN he had returned to the Huai River of his childhood, years ago, to shoot its natural beauty -- instead he found it filthy and polluted. More aggressive inducements may be needed to prompt public-private partnerships for sponge-city development. The major international financial institutions engaged in the sector are the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, complemented by bilateral donors such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the German KfW. |- It is known for having introduced for the first time the concept of Community Led Total Sanitation in China in Puchang County in Shaanxi in 2005.[39]. Counties are not specifically mentioned. The massive South-North Water Transfer Project has supplied Beijing with an annual 2 billion cubic metres of Yangtze River water since 2014, but is not a long-term solution.