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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Yellow River 'drying up' |
| 2004-08-02 |
| We've talked about China's future here many times. Here's another doomsday scenario. Along the river's banks live a third of China's enormous population, more than 400 million people. The vast plains that are irrigated by its muddy waters produce most of China's wheat, much of its maize and even some of its rice. The Yellow River is also known as "China's sorrow". The name comes from its propensity to run wild, regularly inundating large swathes of the North China plain, and drowning tens of thousands of its inhabitants. But today the Yellow River is more famous for the exact opposite. For more than 200 days of the year this once mighty river no longer makes it to the sea. It's like the Rhine petering out in central Germany, or the Nile drying up in northern Sudan. Why? In large part humans are to blame, in particular China's communist rulers, who have long believed nature should be bent to man's will. The river has been overused and abused. Dozens of dams block its flow, drawing off huge quantities of water to grow cotton in the desert. In 50 years the communists have done more to destroy the river than their predecessors in the last 5,000. |
| Posted by:Chuck Simmins |
| #8 more research. I'll bet that this guy is all pissed off at the Xiaolangdi Multipurpose Dam Project which is part of a flood control/power generation plan for the Yellow River. Mayhap they're filling it up, too? Fortunately, Green power in China probably means stoking the furnaces *with* greens. |
| Posted by: Brutus 2004-08-02 10:37:24 PM |
| #7 Isn't this the river that flooded like a mother a last year and burst through its banks and levys? Could that be part of why it isn't flowing to the ocean: it is busy making lakes? Next we'll hear about how the Yangtze is Drying up while they fill the resevoir behind the Schmucks the lot of them. |
| Posted by: Brutus 2004-08-02 10:19:56 PM |
| #6 "The Origin of the Yellow River" by I.P. Daily. An oldie but a goodie. |
| Posted by: Tibor 2004-08-02 9:50:38 PM |
| #5 Sounds like an efficient use of resources. What good is having the Yellow River reach the ocean? It then becomes unusable. Might as well use it up before it gets there. |
| Posted by: Anonymous5974 2004-08-02 7:04:11 PM |
| #4 Thank you, Zhang Fei, for the background on this particular journalistic cretin. Wingfield-Hayes is the one who wrote the He consistently fails to mention any downside of the massively top-heavy Chinese regime while spouting all sorts of positivistic twaddle, even when it is directly contradicted by common knowledge or outright facts. This idjit needs some intensive clue-bat therapy. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-02 5:37:28 PM |
| #3 They should have the North Koreans draft an appropriate triumphal press release for them, quickly before somebody notices that anti-imperialist non-capitalists are bad for the enviroment. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-08-02 4:56:11 PM |
| #2 Rupert Wingfield Hayes is one of the BBC's pet morons. His reporting on Afghanistan was just some of the most moronic crap I have ever seen, ripe with the generalizations necessary for "reporters" who are too scared, lazy or appreciative of creature comforts to go to the front lines. I doubt his China reporting is any better - note the graphic accompanying the article on the supposed link between global warming and industry (when the actual cause is the sun getter hotter). Anything the BBC reports that has anything to do with the environment should be taken with buckets of salt. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-08-02 3:13:49 PM |
| #1 China just needs to get Halliburton connected to this somehow and then we'll have lefties swinging from the rafters demanding that the US send aid. |
| Posted by: Laurence of the Rats 2004-08-02 3:06:50 PM |