ABSTRACT

The demands of a rapidly expanding urban population and industry have added to the burdens on the water supply and in many places have resulted in appropriation of water from the rural areas. In particular, the abundant coal reserves that fuel much of China's rapid economic growth lie in particularly arid parts of the north and northwest that rely heavily on irrigation to produce crops. This chapter focuses on policies adopted in the twenty-first century to address this panoply of water nightmares, centring on the Strictest Water Resources Management System (SWRMS) and the Three Red Lines (TRL) that stem from it. It provides an account of how China's twenty-first-century water management policies evolved out of the hyperactive hydraulic state of the previous half century. The TRL are significant in that they seek to address simultaneously three often separate domains of water policy: total water use, ambient water quality and efficiency of water use.