Name: China’s Yellow River: Taming the cradle of Chinese civilisation
Uploaded: 2024-10-07T13:09:02.000Z
Duration: 8 min 25 s
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The Yellow River is China's second-longest river and the sixth-longest in the world.

It also has two contradictory identities.

As the birthplace of Asian Chinese civilization, the Yellow River is often referred to as the Mother River, but it's also known as China's Sorrow.

For thousands of years, the river's unrelenting wrath has been on full display through floods and droughts that have killed or starved millions of people.

Today, the Yellow River sustains 140 million people and irrigates 15% of China's farmlands, making its protection one of the government's top environmental priorities.

For centuries, every ruler that has governed China had been forced to put tremendous efforts into taming the river or risk being toppled.

The Yellow River was the breadbasket of China.

What you might think of as a kind of technological imperative, which is that if you're in charge of a society where millions of people's livelihoods depend on the stability of that very fertile land, you have an obligation to keep people safe.

The other I would point out, and this isn't unique to China,

I think this is maybe a human trait, which is that we try to tame nature as an ideological exercise.

So what has made the river so prone to disaster?

The river is yellow because of the huge amount of silt it carries when it flows through the lowest plateau in central China.

The silt comes from soil washed away from the area as a result of thousands of years of deforestation that has also raised the riverbed.

Experts suggest humans had been trying to tame the Yellow River for thousands of years by building levees, dikes, and dams.

But their efforts had the opposite effect.

Soil sediment accumulated in the riverbed and raised the river even higher, making it more vulnerable to flooding.

People built more levees, causing the river to rise further, turning it into a vicious cycle.

Studies have shown that the river burst through its levees nearly 1,600 times between 602 BC and 1949, and even resulted in the river changing course at times.

In modern times, the river faced another problem.

As China's economy developed in the 20th and 21st centuries, its appetite for water soared.

From the late 1980s, a drop in rainfall and increasing consumption drained water from the river faster than it could replenish, causing the Yellow River to stop flowing to the sea entirely.

It has almost become an annual occurrence.

The longest period without any weather flow occurred in 1997, lasting for 226 days and extending 700 km upstream from the river mouth.

The river was in such bad shape that some experts declared it dead at the time.

It's technically dead anyway because it has the highest silt content of any river in the world.

From a technical point of view, the flow in the river is no longer water.

Today, China's Mother River is once again living up to its name thanks to a series of aggressive government measures.

In 1998, Chinese authorities enforced an annual plan to limit the amount of water each province along the river could take.

The Yellow River Conservancy Commission was put in charge of managing the plan.

Its main focus was to ensure there was enough water left in the river to support the ecosystem.

In 2001, the government finished building the Xiaolandi hydropower station, which can hold more than 12.5 billion cubic meters of water.

The project serves two major functions for flood prevention and managing silt buildup in the river.

This brought a system of vessels into operation in the Yellow River, giving the government the capacity to store excess flood water during rainy seasons and release stored water during dry seasons.

It could also release water to wash away sediment built up on the riverbed.

The government also initiated a reforestation campaign.

Wooded areas along the Yellow River have increased by 44%, from 26,000 square kilometers in 2000 to 33,000 square kilometers in 2017.

Trees help reduce silting in rivers by providing canopies to keep rainwater from washing off excessive soil, while their roots hold onto loose soil.

In 2023, the Yellow River Protection Law was passed to address underground water usage, which has long been one of the main causes of water loss and environmental damage along the Yellow River basin.

These measures have kept the Yellow River flowing for the past 22 years.

A study in 2020 concluded the river is the clearest it has been in 500 years.

Despite its apparent success, however, the river's future remains murky.

Some experts have suggested a clearer Yellow River is not an entirely good thing.

While reforestation campaigns and increased farming are improving soil conditions and supplying more food for the country, they are also reducing the amount of groundwater flowing into the river.

With less water from land areas, there's less sediment in the river.

And with less water, it also moves slower and carries less of the silt downstream.

Scientists expected the elevation of the riverbed would slow, or even reverse, which would cut the risk of flooding.

But it could also destabilize the riverbank in some areas.

In a worst-case scenario, the river could dry up again.

Experts from China State Laboratory also predict that if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will decrease water resources in the early and mid-21st century.

But after 2080, the river will see an increase in rainfall and extreme flood events.

In 2023, water management authorities in northwestern China warned of water shortages in the Yellow River.

The situation could worsen in the coming years, posing a risk to agriculture in Ningxia and in Mongolia.

What else is the Chinese government supposed to do?

It can't realistically let massive flooding happen.

And the consequences on the entire nation would be catastrophic.

And we have amazing technological capacities.

I mean, what's happened in modern China is unbelievable when you think about it in terms of shifting away from this constant litany of disaster.

But no, we're not going to be able to stop nature from being nature.

We think about building a wall or a levee or reforesting, which are positive things.

But we also now need to really think longer term.

And as populations continue to concentrate and grow, it's only going to become more consequential.