From Theory to Practice
- Solving the Yellow River Problems Half The Globe Away

George Y. Leung

In the early 1990s my interest in understanding the problems related to China's Yellow River became revitalized, largely because I discovered that there was a great deal of published information on Yellow River available after combing through the book stacks of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Back issues of the journals People's Yellow River and China's Water and Soil Conservation, published by the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC), discussed all aspects of the situation, from government policy to minute details of observations and research. Instead of concentrating on the flood-prevention programs, as it was the current YRCC policy, I wanted to look into the much broader issues of soil conservation and sediment reduction, which aimed at long-term benefits and not just short-term fix ups. I was convinced that small-scale projects implemented locally over large areas would work better than a few large-scale dam projects for Yellow River. Coupling soil conservation with land reclamation, the economic and social benefits of such an approach could be enormous. I must try to answer the question: If soil and water conservation is so important, why isn't it happening? Being a physicist, an outsider, not tied down by conventional wisdoms, I would look at it from a fresh perspective.

In 1993, I drafted a paper proposing an erosion-control program that would reduce Yellow River's sediment by half within, say, twenty years, and gave an estimate of the total cost that would be involved. The paper was written in Chinese, and was later published in People's Yellow River in 1994. Since library research alone is never satisfactory to deal with a realistic project, I need to do some on-site inspections. How could I get my foot into a door which was half the globe away? I began by writing to the editors of People's Yellow River offering to do English translations for the journal if they would invite me to associate with them for a summer, and I would come on my own expenses. Luckily, I got a response for my feeler, and I was invited to visit the journal and YRCC in Zhengzhou for a week.

I arrived at Zhengzhou in June 1994, and it was my first opportunity talking to engineers who spent a lifetime dealing with the river and its problems. After finishing a week of translation work, I was given a two-week tour of the river and its Loess Plateau in the river's middle basin. Following the river upstream I stopped at the Xiaolangde Dam project which was preparing its foundation for construction, and inspected the Sanmenxia Dam, before I reached Xian, where the Middle Basin Bureau under YRCC was located. The Bureau dealt mainly with small soil conservation projects, which though were rather popular in the 1950s and 1960s, became neglected since 1970s as the economy of the region was depressed. My presence and suggestions to engage in soil conservation were actually delightful to them; giving them hope that new external advocacy would revitalize government interest in this region. I then spent a week inspecting some dam sites and gully works in Changwu and Jingchuan near the Shaanxi-Gansu border.

At Xian I also learned that the World Bank was providing a loan of US$150 million to the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project, which was a poverty alleviation program to improve farmland for the agricultural sector in the Loess Plateau, sponsored by four provinces: Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Gansu. It was exactly the type of project I was interested in. After I returned to the U.S., I contacted the World Bank office in Washington DC, and flew down to talk to the project manager Juergen Voegele, a German economist. Our conversation was extremely amicable, and within fifteen minutes we reached a meeting of the minds. He agreed with my proposal, and invited me to join their team on a monitoring mission to the project in the following summer.

With the newly acquired connections with YRCC and the World Bank, I thought I should help to popularize the recent progresses by organizing a symposium in the U.S. "The Yellow River Symposium: Conservation Measures for the Yellow River" was held on April 22, 1995, at the facility of the University of Maryland, which was chosen because of its proximity to the Washington DC area. The Vice Commissioner of YRCC, Huang Ziqiang, the Director of Middle Basin Bureau, Meng Qingmei, and the World Bank's Daniel Gunaratnam in charge of the Yellow River program in China, were invited to be speakers. I was able to recruit the aids of the Chinese American Water Resources Association to reach many interested parties in water resources. As a whole, the symposium achieved its objective.

Two months later I joined the World Bank team to monitor the progress of the Loess Plateau project, which was an eye-opening experience for me. I began to have a grasp of the physical conditions, as well as the economy of the region. The monitoring mission lasted two weeks, but I had accumulated enough statistics for me to digest for a year. The rehabilitation program concentrated mainly on building terrace fields, but very little on gully improvement of the type that I advocated.

On my way home, passing through Beijing, my physicist friend, He Zuoxiu, an Academician in Sinica Academia, suggested that he could organize a conference for me to advance my advocacy for gully reclamation. I then returned to Beijing in October to present my economic analysis of the cost effectiveness of gully improvement at "The Forum on Strategic Planning for Water Resources in the 21st Century." 1995 turned out to be a busy year.

The following year, I started a website, "The Yellow River Home Page," to distribute information about the Loess Plateau that I had collected. An English article on "Reclamation and Sediment Control in the Middle Yellow River Valley" was published in Water International. Similar articles in Chinese were also written for magazines in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I then tried to raise fund to start a pilot gully reclamation project to demonstrate its merits. I traveled to Hong Kong and Taiwan to give talks, and attempt to raise fund at the same time. It was an arduous effort, but with little success in fund raising.

After receiving various visiting delegations from YRCC throughout the years and making my effort known to them, I was again invited by YRCC in the summer of 1997 to examine the existing small dam systems. I had a two-week land tour in July: starting from Xian and visited different sites in Shaanxi , Shanxi , and Inner Mongolia, before I took a train back to Beijing from Huhhot. The tour was again an eye-opener for me. I was amazed to discover that so little consideration was paid to recover the cost of dam construction. Dams were constructed with government funds for the sole purpose of trapping sediment. However, with just a little additional expenses irrigated land could be created utilizing the water from the dam reservoir, which could be of enormous benefit to the farmers. Furthermore, irrigation would raise the productivity of the land so much that the cost for the building the irrigated land could actually be recovered. We could consider privatizing the dam building enterprise. I wrote up an article explaining this approach immediately, and had it submitted for publication in the journal People's Yellow River. Unfortunately, I never heard from the journal whether it was published, and never seen the article appearing anywhere either.

Before I returned from China, I also attended "The Third Cross-Strait Conference on Scientific and Technology Exchange in Water Resources" in Beijing in an effort to make my proposal known. Being an outsider, I tried to know the scientific community in water resources by attending such conferences. Here I met many technical personnel from Taiwan, which led to my next trip to Taiwan in January 1998 to speak at the Taiwan University, and to raise fund.

When I tried to re-establish contact with my former colleagues in the Civil Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I earned my M.S. degree (before I switched to Physics), my program found immediate acceptance by its Chairperson, Rafael L. Bras, who invited me to give a presentation at the department, and asked me to join a three-university joint proposal to study the geomorphology of the Loess Plateau with computer simulation. I was reluctant to join, since I didn't really have time to pursue purely academic studies, but I agreed to play a role as they needed me to get connections to obtain land data from the China side. Bras helped me to organize a second "Yellow River Symposium: Loess Plateau Small Watershed Rehabilitation" on June 13, 1998, at the M.I.T. facility. Two speakers from YRCC, Dong Baohua and Zheng Xinmin, were invited. Voegele of the World Bank, Bras of M.I.T. and David Kao of Iowa State University, in addition to myself, gave their presentations. It drew a good size audience even though a record-breaking rainstorm descended on us that day.

At the symposium I talked to Voegele that I intended to take a sabbatical leave for a semester during the Spring term of 1999, and that I could represent World Bank at the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project for an extensive period of time, like two months. Voegele expressed interest at my suggestion, as the project was just about to come to a close, and an extension with another loan of US$150 million was being negotiated. It would be a good idea to have a comprehensive evaluation of the first phase of the project before the second phase was launched. For me, it would be a great opportunity to appraise the effectiveness of the project personally by comparing the conditions before and after the project was launched.

In January 1999, I first joined Voegele on another project monitoring mission, and also participated in the project's final evaluation meeting conducted in Xian to determine if the terms of the loan agreement had been fulfilled, before I was going to be alone, doing solo on a fact-finding mission. I began with the northern sites where I had been to previously in 1995, and tried to work out a list of items I should pay attention to. Living and working with the local personnel daily and with a lot of time on hand, I learned a great deal from such an experience. Then, because of the Spring Festival, I had to return to Beijing to wait for the 15-day vacation to be over before I could get back to my mission in earnest. Subsequently, beginning in early March I, devoted the next month and half visiting various project sites on the Loess Plateau, starting with sites in northern Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, and worked my way down south to Gansu and southern Shaanxi. Finally, when I returned home I spent nearly a year writing up a comprehensive report on my findings and appraisals for the World Bank. I had never worked so hard, with so little in compensation, ever in my life. It was an act of devotion.

By then, I was fully convinced that the soil conservation projects could be privately financed if new farmland could become its by-product. Sediment could be utilized as resources, instead of treated as harmful waste to be disposed of. I started to advocate this approach in solving Yellow River's long-term problem. Instead of waiting for the government to allocate funds to complete the soil conservation program, we could use the silt-trapping dams to provide irrigation for the farmers and collect water fees from the farmers to pay for the construction of the dam. As long as the farmers could be benefited by this approach, there was no reason why wouldn't they accept it with enthusiasm. As long as such loan program was not a one-shot deal, there was no reason why the farmers would want to jeopardize their loan credit by forfeiting loan repayment.

With the help of several friends in Hong Kong, in particular my good friend York Liao, who became a successful entrepreneur in electronics, we started to explore the possibility of this type approach by setting up a fund to give loans to develop irrigation projects that would trap sediment on the side. In 2001, the Yellow Earth Fund Limited was incorporated in Hong Kong which would provide commercial loans to fund land reclamation projects with specific demands.

We first approached the Water Resources Department at Dongsheng (now Erdos) in Inner Mongolia to set up a pilot project. I met its former Department Head, Han Xueshi, during my previous trips there, and I found him very capable and felt that he could help. Han was indeed a good choice. Though he was unclear of our purpose at first and made the erroneous arrangements for us, he quickly realized what we were going to do, when we went to Dongsheng in July 2001 and talked to him face to face. He then directed us to Zhunger Banner to work with the Water Resources Department on the county level. It was exactly the scale of operation that we desired. Its Department Head, Wu Zhongke, turned out to be an extremely capable and sincere person. We were so glad to have discovered such a person to deal with. A loan of ¥500,000 RMB (approximately US$60,000) was agreed upon to start a pilot project. Construction would initiate in the spring of 2002 and be completed by the spring of 2003 so that the newly created irrigated fields could be planted in 2003.

In January 2002 during my school's winter break I went to Xianyang to explore possible investment sites there, since I knew Xianyang's Water Resources Department well from my previous visits. We investigated several possibilities, but didn't find them as attractive. We tried to develop the Zhunger sites more extensively before we moved out to the less promising sites. In September 2002, I went to Zhunger again to document the living conditions before the implementation of the project, so as to be able to make comparisons later. Zhunger suffered from three consecutive years of drought, and the farmers had no incomes all that time. It was very depressing. A year later when we returned to Zhunger in October 2003, we were so happy to see that the drought was over, the harvest was excellent, and the villagers came out to greet us joyously. What we witnessed confirmed our expectations, and we intended to pursue this approach as vigorously as we can.

A week later, when I attended the International Yellow River Forum in Zhengzhou, I was told that YRCC was going to fund heavily on sediment-trapping dams, to the tune of adding 60,000 units within the decade. Engineers from the Middle Basin Bureau were so happy to see that the program they advocated finally received recognition. For our Fund it would mean that we could now help the farmers to develop irrigated land by making use of the existing dams and reservoirs built by YRCC. This would mean considerable savings to the farmers. We shall proceed along this line of thought with vigor.

I am more confident now than ever before that the Yellow River would run clear one day within the next generation!