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China Water Conservancy
Irrigation was important in China's traditional agriculture,
and some facilities existed as long as 2,000 years ago. The
extension of water conservancy facilities by labor-intensive means
was an important part of the agricultural development programs of
the 1950s. During the Great Leap Forward, a number of water
conservancy projects were undertaken, but with insufficient
planning and capital. During the turmoil and bad weather of
1959-61, many water conservancy works were washed out by floods or
otherwise destroyed, considerably reducing the irrigated acreage.
Facilities were rebuilt in the early 1960s. By the 1980s irrigation
facilities covered nearly half the cultivated land; systems
installed since the late 1960s extended over a considerable part of
north China, especially on the North China Plain.
In the era of post-Mao reform, irrigation and drainage systems
expanded to increase the stock of stable and high-yielding land.
The inventory of mechanical pumps also greatly increased; powered
irrigation equipment reached almost 80 million horsepower in 1985.
In this period the government began to charge fees for the water
the farmers used, and farmers therefore limited the amount of water
applied to their crops on a benefit cost basis. The reorganization
of rural institutions weakened administrative measures necessary to
make large- scale waterworks function. Lowered investment, poor
maintenance, and outright damage to facilities lessened the
effectiveness of the system. Adding additional acreage was likely
to be increasingly costly because areas not under irrigation were
remote from easily tapped water sources. In the mid-1980s
government officials recognized the problems and undertook to
correct them.
North China is chronically short of water and subject to
frequent droughts
(see Climate
, ch. 2). A considerable proportion
of its irrigation water comes from wells. Officials in the Ministry
of Water Resources and Electric Power (and its predecessors) have
periodically proposed diverting water from the Chang Jiang to
irrigate the North China Plain. The enormous expense of
constructing such a project has precluded its realization. Farmers
have also been encouraged to use sprinkler systems, a more
efficient use of scarce water resources than flood-type irrigation
systems.
Data as of July 1987
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