Published by: THE WORLD UYGHUR NETWORK NEWS October 16, 1997

10/10/97, China Daily

EDITOR'S Note:

Our staff reporter Zhao Huanxin concluded a 12-day visit to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region early this month. The following is the first of his four reports from China's largest region, where people struggle to survive amid extensive deserts and scarce water resources.

URUMQI -- It is imperative to strengthen management of the Tarim, China's longest inland river, to protect the fragile ecology of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, said Yang Zhenhuai, a senior National People's Congress (NPC) official in the regional capital last Thursday.

"We cannot wait until the entire Tarim River dries up. Laws and regulations on the distribution and utilization of water resources should be made by taking the whole river basin into consideration."

Yang, formerly Minister of Water Resources and now co-chairman of the NPC Environmental and Resources Protection Committee, had just wound up a 12-day environment inspection round in the northwestern region, part of the China Century Tour for Environmental Protection.

The 2,430-kilometre Tarim River, flowing east and southeast through the desolate Taklamakan desert -- the world's second-largest drifting desert -- is regarded as Xinjiang's lifeblood.

More than 47 per cent of the region's population live in the river basin, which has a drainage area of 1.06 million square kilometres, one-ninth of China's total land area.

However, since the late 1960s, the main stream of the river from Xiaojiake, the meeting point of the Tarim's tributaries, the Aksu, Hotan and Yarkant rivers, has come to a halt in Daxihaizi Reservoir, 340 kilometres away from Taitema Lake, the river's original mouth.

Yang attributed the shrinkage of the flow to slack management of the river, particularly the profligate use of water resources in the river's upper and middle reaches, where overcultivation and the arbitrary opening of irrigation channels and ditches swallow up a large proportion of the scarce water.

Xie Zhiqiang, vice-director of the region's Environmental Protection Bureau, said waste land reclaimers and enterprises had opened up 138 breaches along the 1,000-kilometre main stream of the Tarim River, each diverting at least 30 million cubic metres of water a year. However, less than 10 per cent of the breaches have controlling floodgates. This misuse of water has been ecologically disastrous in the long run, experts said. Evaporation of the irrigation water in the upper and middle reaches results in salt accumulation in the surface soil,

eventually rendering it useless for crop production.

"The key to the Tarim River problem is to enhance management based on the law," Yang told regional government officials.

He urged swift action to promulgate a water resources law for the Tarim River to curb the short-sighted and reckless use of the river water. Yang suggested to the officials that a powerful Tarim River management committee, composed of leading regional and local government officials and directors of water-consuming enterprises, should co-ordinate the use of Tarim water. A unified method for charging for water use should be worked out in order to curb the proliferation of local water diversion schemes, Yang said.

Pleading for more importance to be attached to the Tarim as it is one of the principal rivers in China, Tang Shuhong, director of Tarim River Basin Conservancy, asked the Ministry of Water Resources to provide technical and financial assistance to its conservancy.