Water security: What China's hydro plan to secure Tibetan water resources means for its neighbours

27 September 2022

Historically, China has been a water-scarce country with an uneven distribution of water resources. With more than a quarter of its land classified as desert, China has one of the planet’s most arid regions. More specifically, China hosts 20 per cent of the world’s population but only 7 per cent of its fresh water. Entire areas of the country constantly suffer from water scarcity, especially in the north. Approximately 28,000 rivers have disappeared over the last 30 years, and intensive agriculture, industrialisation, and pollution have spoiled much of the remaining water. In 2005, then-Prime Minister Wen Jia Bao identified water shortages as being a threat to “the very survival of the Chinese nation”.

By 2016, up to 90 per cent of China’s groundwater and half of its river water was too dirty to drink. Additionally, more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water were unusable for industry or farming. This is a massively expensive problem for China: the country loses over USD 100 billion annually as a result of water scarcity, by having to divert water from comparatively wet regions to drought-plagued areas through complex and costly engineering projects. But there is more: beyond simply sustaining life, water represents one of China’s most important sources of energy. Accounting for almost a fifth of the total energy production in the country, hydroelectricity is one of China’s biggest sources of energy, second only to coal. With the push to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 — a target announced by President Xi Jinping at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 75) in 2020 — it will become increasingly pivotal to the sustainable development of the country.

The Chinese government is also aware that water scarcity might lead to political instability. Conflicts can escalate, especially within groups penalised in terms of water allocation either geographically (like in the arid northern areas of the country) or socially (like in poorer rural areas), and the lack of such an important resource to sustain the well-being and the growth of the country might threaten the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy to rule. Therefore, Beijing has shown itself determined to secure as much water as possible — even if this means coming into conflict with its neighbours and adopting a non-cooperative approach. This endangers Asian water security: China shares 42 transboundary watercourses with neighbouring countries. In the case of India, shared water resources are intertwined, with a long, complex, and delicate border dispute.

Damming and water diversion projects in Tibet

As the world’s third largest store of fresh water (after the glacier ice reserves in the north and south poles), approximately a fifth of the world’s population relies on the water reserves of the Tibetan plateau. Ten major Asian rivers — including the Indus, Mekong, Yangtze, Yellow, Irrawaddy, and the Brahmaputra — are fed by the plateau’s glaciers. It is therefore no surprise that Chinese authorities have long had their eyes on Tibet’s water resources. They have proposed spending billions of RMB to build hydropower dams and create a system of canals to tap water from the Himalayan snowmelt and glaciers and transport it hundreds of kilometres north and east to the country’s farm and industrial regions. China is undertaking a huge project to construct five dams on the Brahmaputra River (called the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibetan) in Shannan Prefecture in the Tibet Autonomous Region, reportedly in Gyatsa, Jiexu, Langzhen, Zangmu, and Zhongda.

For India, the priority should be to maintain an open channel of communication and data sharing, while pushing for a water-sharing treaty between China and other South Asian neighbours, like Bangladesh.

The damming of the Brahmaputra started on 12 November 2010, with the RMB 7.9 billion Zangmu Hydropower Station, which has been operational since 13 October 2015. In the mid-2010s, Chinese authorities approved the projects involving the other four above-mentioned dams. Construction is currently underway on the 360MW Gyatsa Dam and the 510MW Jiexu Dam, located, like the others, on the middle section of the Yarlung Tsangpo. So far, Chinese authorities have always avoided mega-projects in more delicate regions due to multiple factors including environmental and feasibility concerns, as well as wariness about provoking India.

However, this policy seemed to have shifted recently. The 14th Five Year Plan presented in 2021 included a new controversial hydropower project on the Brahmaputra. This constitutes a victory for the state-owned power company PowerChina, which entered into a “strategic cooperation agreement” with the Tibetan regional government and successfully linked new projects to the idea of preserving national security by protecting homeland water resources in its lobbying efforts. As a result, the Chinese government announced in 2021 that it would seek to exploit the hydropower potential of the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo.

The plan to dam the waters of the Brahmaputra would affect over 140 million people who depend on the river. India and Bangladesh would have to bear the brunt of the planned damming, resulting in potentially receiving less water from the river course due to restricted water flow. Concerns have been raised about how diverting the water would affect the downstream flow in Northeast India and beyond. Although Li Chaoyi, the chief engineer of the China Huaneng Group (i.e., the prime contractor of the project), has said that the river’s flow would not be affected by the construction of the dam, apprehension remains.

The Great Bend — a tempting but risky project

Even as several hydropower stations have started to appear along the Brahmaputra during the past decade, all those projects pale in comparison to the project planned at the Great Bend — the most remote stretch of the river near the disputed border with the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the river performs a dramatic U-turn. Having a drop in elevation of more than 2,000 meters from one side of the Great Bend to the other makes this one of the most untapped hydropower resources on the planet. The new dam could help generate up to 60 gigawatts of power, three times as much as central China’s Three Gorges Dam — which currently has the largest installed hydropower capacity in the world.

*Map of the Brahmaputra River. Image source:* *Wikimedia*.

The new dam could provide 300 billion kWh of clean, renewable, and zero-carbon electricity annually, helping Beijing to meet its clean energy goals and strengthening water security. However, the project comes with tremendous risk because the Great Bend sits atop the Indo-Tsangpo Suture Zone — a seismically active region of the Himalayas where the tectonic plates of India and Eurasia meet, which is susceptible to some of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. Moreover, the project could have a remarkable impact on downstream areas, both in geopolitical and ecological terms. The Great Bend sits along the disputed and poorly defined Line of Actual Control and includes large pockets of territory claimed by India and occupied by China, and vice versa. India fears that China is trying to divert the waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo as it has along the Mekong River, where China has allegedly restricted water flow to downstream Southeast Asian countries. Such a huge dam could also hold back the massive amount of silt carried by the river, affecting farming and resulting in challenges to food security in the areas downstream.

But the main concern is that dams, canals, and irrigation systems can turn water into a political weapon to be wielded, in times of war as much as during times of peace, to impact those countries sharing the river water flow. The dams built by China may be large enough to be turned into storage dams, which would make it possible to manipulate the water freely for flood control or irrigation. In such a scenario, China could potentially deprive India of water during dry seasons, or release water during the monsoon season when north-eastern states are already experiencing floods. As the upstream state, China has a clear advantage in building dams and other infrastructure to store or divert the water flow of river systems.

Even though there is no water cooperation agreement between India and China, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in 2002 that requires China to share hydrological data of the river (mainly the water level) during the monsoon season between May and October, to alert downstream areas in the event of floods. However, during the 2017 Doklam border standoff between India and China, the latter stopped sharing this data. Although data sharing resumed in 2018, India has reasons to believe that China may withhold data again in case of another such standoff.

India’s moves to counteract the impacts of the Chinese project

India does not fare much better than China in terms of water scarcity. The country has less than 4 per cent of the global water resources and nearly 17 per cent of the world’s population. Consequently, the Brahmaputra River — which accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the country’s freshwater resources and about 44 per cent of its total hydropower potential — is of great importance to India. The Chinese decision to build more and more dams on the Brahmaputra and its continued evasiveness on its long-term plans (including the number and kind of dams it intends to build) have been an issue of major concern for India. China insists that the dams are, and will continue to be, run-of-river projects, where water will be returned to the river after use. As such, there should be no fears of diverting, hoarding or releasing water later.

Shortly after China announced its plans for the Yarlung Tsangpo, Indian media reported that its government was exploring a 10-gigawatt hydropower dam and reservoir as a way of counteracting the impacts of the Chinese project. “The need of the hour is to have a big dam in Arunachal Pradesh to mitigate the adverse impact of the Chinese dam projects”, TS Mehra, a senior official in India’s federal water ministry, told Reuters in an interview in December 2020. More specifically, India plans to construct the country’s second-largest dam at Yingkiong in Arunachal Pradesh to allow the release of water to maintain water security in case China builds structures to divert water. Also, in the case that China releases water from its upper reaches, such a dam will additionally help to store water to prevent floods.

Meanwhile, in the face of both the Chinese dam project and another Indian project in the region (i.e., the Lower Subansiri Hydro-Electric Project by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation in Assam), several political factions, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have demanded a halt to the projects, stating that the construction of dams in such a high seismic hazard zone would pose a grave danger to the residents of Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, and Jorhat in Assam. The parties also asked for a mutually acceptable water agreement between India and China.

The nasty interaction between nature and geopolitics

The indispensability of water, combined with its scarcity in the region, creates a fertile breeding ground for potential conflict. The Chinese government dreads instability and cares deeply about preserving the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Therefore, Beijing’s prolific dam-building activities should be interpreted in the context of its national security concerns. What should not be underestimated, however, are the implications of China’s actions for other countries crossed by the Tibetan river, both in strategic and ecological terms.

From a regional point of view, and with the advantage of being an upstream state, China shares a great many major transboundary watercourses (including lakes) with its neighbouring countries. As a result, China’s international water policy is at the core of Asia’s water security. However, a considerable amount of diplomatic work will be required to ensure peace and balance, since China has built more dams on its own rivers than the rest of the world combined and has not signed any water-sharing agreement or treaty with any of its neighbours, including India. China has also been reluctant to ratify the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses which provides a framework for multilateral cooperation on water. With specific reference to the projects involving the Brahmaputra River, negotiating a common agreement is not going to be easy, as relations between India and China are already at their lowest point, with troops in the western Himalayas ready for action. The water rush (concurrent to the global climate and energy crisis) might be a trigger for a conflict between the two most populous countries in the world.

How the situation evolves will invariably be tied not only to the outcome of the India-China border dispute but also to regional hydropower dynamics and geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific. For India, the priority should be to maintain an open channel of communication and data sharing, while pushing for a water-sharing treaty between China and other South Asian neighbours, like Bangladesh. Ultimately, the outcome of diplomatic efforts will depend on China’s approach: whether it wants to emerge as a cooperative country or continue leaning on its authoritarian, non-cooperative, and hegemonic outlook, solidifying its position of acting as a self-centred upstream state. What is certain is that water security issues do not end at national borders.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Fabrizia Candido is a contributing author for China Files. She holds a Master’s Degree in Asian International Relations and Institutions from the University of Naples L’Orientale. Her main research interests include China and innovative technologies-related stories. She can also be found on Il Manifesto, Opinio Juris - Law & Politics Review, and Centro Studi Internazionali. Image credit: Flickr/Hugh Llewelyn.