By All Means Necessary (25 page)

Four of the downstream countries—Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia—have long attempted to manage their competing interests through the Mekong River Commission (MRC), a multilateral organization established in 1995 to help cooperatively manage the river's resources. (Burma, which like China currently holds observer status in the MRC, has indicated its interest in joining the organization.) The MRC is characterized as relatively toothless—it has no enforcement powers—but has nonetheless helped on occasion to avoid unnecessary conflict between its parties' interests.
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(If,
for example, benignly adjusting the way one party removes water for agriculture can preserve another's fisheries, a body such as the MRC can help identify opportunities to avoid conflict.) The emergence of China, though, has complicated the situation.

In recent years, China has embarked on an ambitious set of dam projects along the Lancang River. It has built five operational dams; as of early 2013, three more were under construction, and as many as twenty-three others are being contemplated.
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The project that has garnered the most attention is the Xiaowan Dam, which was completed in 2010.
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It is the world's tallest arch dam, and the electricity it generates travels as far away as Shanghai.
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The Nuozhadu Dam, which will have an even larger reservoir than Xiaowan, began early operations as of early 2013 and was slated to be fully operational by 2014.
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These dams threaten to interfere with the seasonal floods on which millions of farmers in Cambodia, Laos, and the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam rely.
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Some analysts also worry that the dams will remove essential sediment from the river.
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Indeed, many experts have expressed alarm at the potential economic and environmental consequences of damming the upper Mekong, focusing in particular on seasonal disturbances. A 2009 report from the United Nations Environment Programme warned that the Chinese dams, by storing large amounts of water for release later, “will largely eliminate the Mekong's annual food pulse [a concentrated period of food production].”
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Most affected would likely be Cambodian fisheries, which account for approximately 16 percent of the country's GDP.
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Local communities have gone further in protesting the Chinese dam projects. Uncharacteristic droughts and floods are now frequently blamed on Chinese dam building.
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“Many local people and groups that monitor the dams in China point the finger at the dams as one of the main causes of drying up of the river, ” says Srisuwan Kuankachorn, a co-head of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, a Thai environmental group. He blames Chinese hydropower projects for drying up river transportation lanes, destroying fisheries, and damaging cropland.
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Yet the weight of evidence on this front runs against blaming the dams for
the damage. Yunnan province (upstream in China) has experienced droughts at the same time the downstream countries have.
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Jeremy Bird, chief executive officer of the Mekong River Commission, has said that “China's dams have not caused this problem”; other sources come to a similar conclusion.
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Greater transparency and technical cooperation might help reduce unnecessary conflict; at a minimum, questions like those over whether Chinese dams are causing drought could be more definitively resolved. Attempts have been made to draw China closer to the MRC for precisely this reason. For many years of the MRC's existence, China refused to share much data. In 2010, during a severe drought, development expert Alan Potkin reflected widespread views when he urged the Chinese to “come clean on how much water they are diverting at Xiaowan and, in the future, at Nuozhadu.”
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“Even Chinese academics in favour of hydropower, ” an
Economist
article noted, “complain that nearly all information to do with these rivers, even the amount of rain that reaches them, is treated as a state secret.”
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At the end of 2010, MRC pressure and a bout of negative publicity led the Chinese government to release more dam-related information, but controversy still remains.
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Some conflicts are unlikely to be amenable to technical resolution. Dams naturally smooth out seasonal variations in water flow, but that is precisely the problem for downstream fisheries and in some cases agriculture. More information on Chinese plans could help countries downstream mitigate some of the resulting damages, but it will not come close to eliminating them. Resolving these more difficult conflicts will likely come down to basic power politics, an area where China has far more leverage than its neighbors. Divergent interests among downstream parties—Thai hydropower generation, for example, may actually benefit from the Chinese dams—make even a united front from MRC members unlikely. And, unlike the case of Kazakhstan, the other parties to the conflict do not have mineral riches to offer China as bargaining chips (though they may be able to offer some concessions on contested territorial boundaries). These dynamics will not lead to so-called water wars involving China, since
Beijing can get what it wants without any such thing (and the downstream countries are far too weak to challenge China), but they will inevitably generate new conflicts within the region.

If one does want to find potential water wars involving China, the natural place to look is its face-off with India over the Brahmaputra. Yet this is perhaps the best example of a situation where the substantive conflict is almost entirely an invention of the participants, and transparency could go a long way to making the prospect of resource conflict go away.

China and India are both rising powers; they also share an old and complex security relationship. The crux of their dispute over water has centered on the Brahmaputra, a 2, 000-mile river shared by China, Bangladesh, and India. The river, whose upper reaches are known in China as the Yarlung Tsangpo, starts in Tibet, runs eastward for hundreds of miles before turning sharply westward, then drops through the Himalayas to flow through the Indian province of Assam, and eventually merges with the Padma, Ganges, and Meghna into the Bay of Bengal.
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Chinese planners have been eyeing the Brahmaputra's hydro potential for years, while Indian analysts, aware of the extent to which their country depends on the river's flow, are growing vocal about the threat they believe Chinese ambitions pose.

For years, Chinese engineers have developed proposals that might exploit the river to help address the country's heavy energy needs. (In 1995, the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics even proposed using a series of nuclear explosives to create a canal through mountain ranges north of the river to irrigate the Gobi Desert.)
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The country has already built a handful of smaller dams along the river and its tributaries.
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Most attention, however, is directed toward the proposed Motuo Dam, a thirty-eight-gigawatt hydropower plant that would be installed at the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra, where the river makes a U-turn from east to west. (A typical nuclear power plant generates one gigawatt of power.) The Great Bend's natural hydropower potential comes from the fact that the water drops nearly two miles as it turns south, creating a natural source of potential energy.
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Chinese planners argue that the project would benefit the world; Zhang Boting, deputy general secretary of the China Society of Hydropower Engineering, notes that it could save 200 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, roughly equivalent to 2 percent of the country's emissions in 2011.
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Hawkish Indian analysts, however, have speculated that the dam is linked to an even more ambitious plan supported by some in China to divert significant quantities of water from the Brahmaputra to the Yellow River in order to help alleviate water shortages in Northern China. Their fears center around the western portion of the notional South-North Water Diversion Project.
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The idea was discussed internationally as early as 1986 and was championed in Li Ling's 2005
Tibet's Waters Will Save China
.
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But given the area's rugged terrain and the long, hard route from the Yangtze to the Yellow River, many officials and analysts have questioned the project's cost and feasibility. In 2011, Wang Shucheng, a former minister of water resources, stated that the plan would not happen, given its difficulty and lack of necessity.
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In October of that year, Vice Minister for Water Resources Jiao Yong stated that “considering the technical difficulties, the [lack of] actual need of diversion and the possible impact on the environment and state-to-state relations, the Chinese government has no plan to conduct any diversification project in this river.”
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Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan environmental law expert, has also held that the diversion scheme is infeasible; “The laws of physics will not allow water diversion from the Great Bend, ” he argues.
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And environmental expert Isabel Hilton has argued that even the worst-case outcome is far less dire than many have claimed:

Even were this project to be pursued…it would not turn off the tap: only 14 percent of the Brahmaputra's flow is in the river at the point at which it enters the gorge….Were the Chinese, by some engineering miracle, to divert the entire flow of the river from within their territory, it would still only account for a small percentage of the river's resources.
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China has apparently not yet begun construction on the Motuo Dam or the diversion scheme. The specter of the project has,
however, still alarmed many in India. Brahma Chellaney, a security expert at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, has emerged as the most vocal critic. “Diversion of the Brahmaputra's water, ” he wrote in 2009, “is an idea that China does not discuss in public, because the project implies environmental devastation of India's northeastern plains and eastern Bangladesh, and would thus be akin to a declaration of water war on India and Bangladesh.”
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Many Chinese security analysts have not helped calm fears but instead have fanned the flames: “If Americans use Taiwan to pressure China, ” wrote one commentator, “why can't China use the Yarlung Tsangpo to balance India?! To pull this out in critical moments, how could we not?”
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Both sides have attempted to forge cooperative agreements to help defuse tensions. After a 2000 mudslide in Tibet, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding. Under this agreement, China agreed to share information concerning water level, rainfall, and discharge from three river stations twice a day with Indian agencies, and to warn the Indian Water Ministry before the execution of any diversion plans.
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Another agreement was made in 2006 to share transborder flood season data.
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Meanwhile, China and India have participated in an annual series of Abu Dhabi dialogues from 2006 to 2009 focusing on promoting water cooperation among seven countries in South Asia.
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China has continued to press forward with its hydropower development plans. On January 23, 2013, the government approved an energy development plan for 2015 that included the construction of three new hydropower facilities on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra River in Tibet.
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After details were shared with Indian policy makers, particularly regarding the “run-of-the-river” nature of the plants (they will not affect the flow of the river), Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh publicly declared that India had no problem with the development.
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Ultimately, the technical challenges associated with the most threatening schemes for the Brahmaputra mean that acute conflict over the river is unlikely. But this does not mean worries about water will not severely strain the China-India relationship.
China's quest for water and energy will likely lead to heightened tension in an emerging great power relationship unless further steps are taken to reassure India that Chinese intentions (and impacts) are benign. To the extent that China is reluctant to participate in joint discussions of water management and impacts, it will also fan broader fears of unilateralism—well beyond water issues—in the region.

China's quest for natural resources has transformed political and security relationships close to home—even as the prospects for military conflict stemming from attempts to secure natural resources have been exaggerated. Interests in oil and gas are compounding broader and more influential security conflicts (along with simple but often intense nationalism) to raise the odds of conflict in the South and East China Seas. And China and its neighbors, like others before them, are unlikely to find international law providing an easy way of resolving their differences. Nonetheless, as China engages in minor standoffs and crises with neighbors, it may learn to manage them, reducing the risk of future escalation. Weighing against this positive trend, though, is rising Chinese nationalism and military capacity, making confrontation appear increasingly attractive to many in Beijing. This risk could intensify if the Chinese economy or political leadership substantially weakened, since that could tempt the Chinese leadership to distract citizens from problems at home by provoking international confrontation.

But not all of the security consequences of China's quest for resources in its near abroad are negative. China's quest for oil, gas, and ores in Central Asia is transforming regional politics in a more cooperative direction, as trade and investment align leaders' interests (if not always those of their people). Meanwhile, China's thirst for water is affecting relationships with a range of downstream neighbors. Here power relationships are unlikely to be transformed—China is both militarily dominant and upstream of its rivals—but
new modes of cooperation could still emerge to shape behavior and forestall conflict.