78 New Japanese PM favours EU-style single regional currency in Asia

(1) China to use Yuan to buy IMF SDR Bonds
(2) Chinese telco Huawei accused of cyber espionage in Australia
(3) Huawei whistleblowers meet ASIO officers
(4) China to divert water from the Brahmaputra River (Yalong Zangbo)
(5) China urges US to halt surveillance near its shores
(6) New Japanese PM favours EU-style single regional currency in Asia

(1) China to use Yuan to buy IMF SDR Bonds

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125205971223086149.html

SEPTEMBER 5, 2009, 3:26 A.M. ET

China to Use Yuan to Buy Bonds From IMF

BY TERENCE POON AND ANDREW BATSON

BEIJING -- China will buy bonds from the International Monetary Fund using the yuan, extending current practices where member nations make most of their contributions to the IMF in local currencies.

The IMF said Wednesday China has agreed to purchase approximately $50 billion worth of bonds denominated in Special Drawing Rights, a fundraising effort that is part of a broader push to bolster the IMF's resources. Brazil and Russia have also said they each intend to buy as much as $10 billion of bonds from the IMF, which ...

(2) Chinese telco Huawei accused of cyber espionage in Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26029043-5001561,00.html

ASIO has ear on Chinese whispers

EXCLUSIVE: Cameron Stewart | September 05, 2009

The Australian

ASIO is investigating claims that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is employing technicians in Australia with direct links to the People's Liberation Army.

The claims have been made by Huawei employees in Sydney and Melbourne, who are understood to have approached ASIO with their concerns.

Huawei has been the subject of critical scrutiny by intelligence agencies in the US and Britain about its alleged links with the Chinese military and intelligence apparatus.

The company, which employs more than 100 people in Sydney and about 20 in Melbourne, was founded by former PLA officer Ren Zhengfei, but strongly denies that it does the bidding of the Chinese government or that it has links with the PLA.

It maintains that it is a legitimate telecom company, having been a part of the recent unsuccessful bid by Singtel Optus to build the $15 billion national broadband network.

The federal government, which has warned about the growing threat of cyber-espionage, has not made any public allegations against Huawei, which has been operating in Australia for four years.

But The Weekend Australian understands that ASIO officers have interviewed current and former Huawei employees - all Australian nationals - several times this year in Melbourne and Sydney.

The claims made to ASIO include:

* That Huawei employs Chinese nationals in Australia who have direct links with the PLA and with the Chinese government;

* That senior Huawei officials are summoned to frequent meetings with Chinese government officials at Chinese embassies and consulates in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne;

* That Huawei has recently sacked several dozen of its Australian-born workforce, replacing them with Chinese nationals brought in from China;

* That Huawei employs a security controller whose full-time job is to monitor the emails and other communications of the company.

The Weekend Australian understands that ASIO has conducted a broad investigation into Huawei's operations in Australia, but it is unclear what the spy probe has found.

A spokesman for Huawei yesterday described as "inaccurate and ungrounded" claims that the company had links to the Chinese military or the Chinese government.

"Huawei is 100 per cent employee-owned and no government or government agencies have any involvement or ownership in our operations," the spokesman said.

"Our links to the government are no more than any links General Electric might have to the US government due to the fact that some members of its management team are military veterans and they sell products to the US military."

He revealed that Huawei representatives met officers from ASIO in June for "a routine briefing" to "provide a brief introduction to Huawei".

The company says about 30per cent of its workers in Australia are "Chinese expats" and that while there had been recent "adjustments to the allocation and structure of resources", there had been no wholesale sacking of Australian staff.

A spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland told The Weekend Australian: "ASIO has frequent contact with the telecommunications industry in Australia. In that context, ASIO contact with Huawei Telecommunications is unsurprising.

"Beyond that, and consistent with longstanding practice of the Australian government, it would be inappropriate to comment on the operational activities of the intelligence community." In his first public speech as ASIO chief, David Irvine, a former ambassador to China, warned in July that cyber espionage was a growing threat for countries such as Australia.

"The explosion of electronic communications technology has expanded infinitely the opportunities for the covert acquisition of information by both state-sponsored and non-state actors," he said.

Beijing has vigorously denied claims that it engages in human or cyber espionage in Australia, but in 2004, ASIO set up a new counter-espionage unit to combat the rising incidence of foreign espionage in Australia.

More recently, the government has boosted the electronic eavesdropping agency, Defence Signals Directorate, to combat what it believes is a concerted attempt by Chinese hackers to gain access to Australian government computer systems.

Huawei was the subject of a US investigation last year after legislators expressed concern about its alleged links to the Chinese military. Intelligence chiefs in the US, Britain and India have debated the legitimacy of Huawei; however, the company has been a commercial success.

In March, the propaganda chief of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Changchun, visited the company's Australian headquarters in Sydney.

(3) Huawei whistleblowers meet ASIO officers
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26029093-5001561,00.html

ASIO officers met whistleblowers in pancake parlour

Cameron Stewart | September 05, 2009

The Australian

A PANCAKE Parlour restaurant and a cafe in the Block Arcade in central Melbourne are unlikely places to discuss claims of Chinese espionage.

But these were among the venues chosen for meetings between ASIO officers and employees of the Australian arm of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei.

ASIO officers have travelled to Melbourne and Sydney this year to meet Huawei whistleblowers, after the domestic spy agency received information alleging that some Huawei technicians and executives had direct links with the Chinese People's Liberation Army and to the Chinese government.

The allegations made by current and former Huawei employees to ASIO were that the Chinese telecommunications company, which has operations across the globe, was not the purely commercial enterprise it claimed to be.

Rather than being a privately owned company that exists only to make profits on the sales of telecom equipment, Huawei's operations in Australia were controlled by the Chinese government, the employees claimed, and several other employees had close links with the PLA.

These employees told ASIO they believed the hi-tech Huawei was involved in cyber espionage against Australian interests, but when grilled by ASIO, were unable to produce firm evidence of espionage activities.

Hauwei strongly denies any suggestions that it is a front for Beijing, describing as "ludicrous and inaccurate" claims that it has links to the Chinese military or the communist government in Beijing.

The company employs more than 100 people in its Sydney office and about 20 in Melbourne and is said to have an annual turnover in Australia of more than $150 million, selling a wide range of telecommunications equipment to other telcos. ASIO's challenge has been to test the veracity of the claims made by these whistleblowers.

Are they telling the truth? What evidence do they have to back their claims? Are they just being paranoid or are their claims motivated by commercial or other factors?

The Weekend Australian does not know what conclusions ASIO has come to in relation to this; however, the spy agency has taken an active and ongoing interest in the information provided to it.

These included claims that there was a clear distinction inside Huawei between its Australian employees and the Chinese nationals the company had brought in from China.

The Chinese nationals were reserved, did not mix with the Australians, and would "drop everything" when asked to attend meetings with Chinese diplomatic officials.

"They would report back through their embassy what was happening," one former Huawei employee told The Weekend Australian. "It seemed that these people had an official function beyond simply doing business."

Another told of how apprehensive Huawei executives were when hosting a visit in March this year of the propaganda chief of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Changchun. "They called him "Number 5", one employee recalls, referring to the fact that Mr Li was ranked five in China's nine-person politburo standing committee.

Another employee noted that Huawei was unusually security conscious, employing one senior official whose sole job was to monitor the company's emails and its external communications.

ASIO's covert probe of the company has been conducted at the same time as Huawei has tried to allay suspicions within the Australian government by providing a "routine briefing" to ASIO officers in June to give them "a brief introduction to Huawei".

(4) China to divert water from the Brahmaputra River (Yalong Zangbo)
http://japanfocus.org/-Kenneth-Pomeranz/3195

The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia

Kenneth Pomeranz

Since we tend to take water for granted, it is almost a bad sign when it is in the news; and lately there have been plenty of water-related stories from South, East, and Southeast Asia. They have ranged from the distressingly familiar -- suicides of North Indian farmers who can no longer get enough water1 – to stories most people find surprising (evidence that pressure from water in the reservoir behind the new Zipingpu dam may have triggered the massive Sichuan earthquake last May).2 Meanwhile, glaciers, which almost never made news, are now generating plenty of worrisome headlines.

Conflicts over water are found in every era and region: the English word "rivalry" comes from a Latin term for "one who uses the same stream as another." And more recently, questions about who gets to exploit water have become intertwined with questions about where the technological and ecological limits of our ability to do so lie – or should lie.

Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau: here the water-related dreams and fears of half the human race come together. Other regions have their own conflicts: the Jordan, the Tigris, the Colorado, and the Parana are just a few of the better-known cases where multiple states make societies make claims on over-stressed rivers. But no other region combines comparable numbers of people, scarcity of rainfall, dependence on agriculture, tempting sites for mega-projects, and vulnerability to climate change. Glaciers and annual snowfalls in this area feed rivers serving 47% of the world's people;3 and the unequalled heights from which those waters descend could provide staggering amounts of hydropower. Meanwhile, both India and China face the grim reality that their economic and social achievements -- both during their "planned" and "market" phases – have depended on unsustainable rates of groundwater extraction. As hundreds of millions face devastating shortages and the technical and financial power of these states (and of some of their smaller neighbors) increase, plans are moving forward for harnessing Himalayan waters through the largest construction projects in history. Even when looked at individually, some of the projects carry enormous risks; and even if they work as planned, they will hurt large numbers of people as they help others. (Nor is it at all clear that many of them will help as much as spending comparable sums on less heroic measures, such as fixing leaky pipes or tightening enforcement of wastewater treatment standards, would do.) Looked at collectively – as overlapping, sometimes contradictory demands on environments that will also feel some of the sharpest effects of global warming over the next several decades – their possible implications are staggering.

The projects to manipulate Himalayan water now completed, planned or underway are numerous, and their possible interactions are complex. And since many of the agencies responsible for them are far from transparent, the possible scenarios quickly multiply to a point where they are almost impossible to keep track of. But some basic – and frightening – outlines do emerge if we start from China – which is, for various reasons, the most dynamic actor in the story -- and then move across the lands that border it to the Southwest, South, and Southeast.4

China's Water Woes and the Push to the Southwest

Water has always been a problem in China, and effective control of it has been associated with both personal heroism and legitimate sovereignty for as far back as our records go – or perhaps even further, since the mythological sage ruler Yu proved his right to rule by controlling floods. But water scarcity has probably been an even greater problem than excesses, especially in the modern period. Surface and near-surface water per capita in China today is roughly 1⁄4 of the global average,5 and worse yet, it is distributed very unevenly. The North and Northwest, with about 380 million people (almost 30% of the national population)6 and over half the country's arable land, have about 7% of its surface water, so that its per capita resources are roughly 20-25% of the average for China as a whole, or 5-6% of the global average; a more narrowly defined North China plain may have only 10-15% of the per capita supply for the country as a whole, or less than 4% of the global average.7 Northern waters also carry far heavier sediment loads than southern ones – most readings on Southern rivers fall within EU maxima for drinking water, while some readings on the middle and lower Yellow River, and the Wei and Yongding Rivers are 25 -50% of that level; water shortages are such that Northern rivers also carry far more industrial pollutants per cubic meter, even though the South has far more industry.8 Northern China also has unusually violent seasonal fluctuations in water supply; both rainfall and river levels change much more over the course of the year than in either Europe or the Americas. North China's year to year rainfall fluctuations are also well above average (though not as severe as those in North and Northwest India). While the most famous of China's roughly 90,000 large (over 15 meters high) and medium-sized dams are associated with hydro-power -- about which more below -- a great many exist mostly to store water during the peak flow of rivers for use at other times.

The People's Republic has made enormous efforts to address these problems – and achieved impressive short-term successes that are now extremely vulnerable. Irrigated acreage has more than tripled since 1950 (mostly during the Maoist period), with the vast majority of those gains coming in the North and Northwest. It was this, more than anything else, that turned the notorious "land of famine" of the 1850-1950 period into a crucial grain surplus area, and contributed mightily to improving per capita food supplies for a national population that has more than doubled since 1949. Plentiful water supplies made it possible for much of northern China to grow two crops a year for the first time in history (often by adding winter wheat, which needs a lot of water); and plentiful, reliable supplies of water were necessary to allow the use of new seed varieties and plenty of chemical fertilizer (which can otherwise burn the soil). And, of course, irrigation greatly reduced the problem of rain coming at the wrong time of year, or not coming at all some years. During the previous two centuries farming in northern China had become steadily more precarious in part because population growth had lowered the water table – early 20th century maps show much smaller lakes than 150 years earlier, and there are many reports of wells needing to be re-drilled at great expense – and in part because the safety net the Qing had once provided fell apart. But beginning in the 1950s, and especially in the 1960s (after the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward) things turned around very impressively.

Much of that turnaround, however, relied on very widespread use of deep wells, using gasoline or electrical power to bring up underground water from unprecedented depths.9 Large-scale exploitation of North China groundwater began in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s at roughly 10 times the annual extraction rates that prevailed during 1949 -1961, and has remained level since about 1980 at roughly 4 times the 1949-1961 level.10 But this amount of water withdrawal is unsustainable. The North China water table has been dropping by roughly 4-6 feet per year for quite some time now, and by over 10 feet per year in many places; some people estimate that if this rate of extraction is maintained, the aquifers beneath the plain will be completely gone in 30-40 years.11 This is by no means a unique situation; in the United States, for instance, the Ogallala Aquifer -- which lies beneath portions of western South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and eastern Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico -- is being depleted at roughly the same rate. (Serious excess withdrawals began there in the 1950s, and as in China, turned areas previously marginal for farming -- the land of the 1930s Dust Bowl – into a breadbasket.) But consider the following: while the 175,000 square miles served by the Ogallala Aquifer are home to less than 2 million people, the 125,000 square miles of the North China plain were home to 214,000,000 people in 2000 (80% of them rural).12 The 2008 North China drought – the worst since the late 1950s drought that exacerbated the Great Leap famines – focused global attention on the problem for a brief moment, but chronic water shortages – both in cities and in the countryside – have been a fact of life for years, and conflicts over scarce and/or polluted water have become common events.13 So what is to be done?

China-India population density map

One hears periodically about various ways water is used inefficiently by urbanites; the Chinese steel industry, for instance, uses about twice as much water per ton produced as steel-makers in the most technologically advanced countries (though the Indian steel industry, for instance, is considerably worse than China's on this score).14 Leaky pipes and other fairly straightforward infrastructure problems create considerable waste. But relatively speaking, industrial and urban residential losses are small potatoes; agriculture still uses at least 65% of all water in China (though less, even in absolute terms, than 20 years ago) and has by far the lowest efficiency rates.15 Moreover, urbanites are sufficiently prosperous that price increases – unless they are very large – are unlikely to cause them to cut back on use very much. Certainly this is not where the most water waste is in commercial terms. According to some estimates, a marginal gallon of water sent from the countryside to Tianjin produces as much as 60 times as much income in its new urban locale as it did in the countryside.16 The best hope in terms of moderating China's overall water demand pressure is probably to keep per capita urban use from growing very much while water use efficiency and living standards there continue improving, and urban population grows sharply. Any significant reductions will have to come from the countryside. That process has begun, but it is unclear how far it can go without devastating social consequences.

A great deal of water is wasted in agriculture, in part because costs to farmers are kept artificially low; and since many rural communities have no way to transfer water to those who would pay more for it, anyway, "waste" has very little short-run opportunity cost for them.17 But it is worth noting here that "waste" has different meanings depending on what time frame one adopts. Irrigation water that never reaches the plants' roots and seeps back into the soil is wasted in the short term – it can't be used for anything else that year. But in the long term, it can help recharge the local aquifer. On the other hand, polluted water that could be re-used if treated properly but instead flows out to sea untreated is wasted in both senses, and thus represents a bigger problem. Chinese agriculture is not necessarily more wasteful in this regard than agriculture in many other places – and the deviations from market prices are no worse than in much of the supposedly market-driven United States – but its limited supplies make waste a much more pressing problem. ...

South-North water diversion plans

The project carries uncertainties commensurate with its size and cost. Among other things, there is considerable uncertainty about how dirty southern waters will be by the time they arrive in the north; diversions on this scale change flow speeds, sedimentation rates, and other important rates in unpredictable ways, and the original plans have already been modified to add more treatment facilities than were originally thought necessary. (Changes in water volume will also affect the ability of other rivers to scour their own beds – effects on the Han River, one of the Yangzi's largest tributaries, are a particular concern.) Conveyance canals passing through poorly drained areas may also raise the water table and add excess salts to the soil – already a common problem in irrigated areas of North China – and salt water intrusion rates in the Yangzi Delta.21 For better or worse, we will begin learning about the effects of the Eastern line soon, and probably about the Central line in just a few years.

But despite its long time horizon, it is the Western line – along with other projects in China's far west -- which is the big story. First of all, it offers the most dramatic potential rewards. The idea is that it will tap the enormous water resources of China's far Southwest – Tibet alone has over 30% of China's fresh water supply, most of it coming from the annual snow melt and the annual partial melting around the edges of some Himalayan glaciers. These water resources are an aspect of the Tibet question one rarely hears about, but the many engineers in China's leadership, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are very much aware of it. (And ordinary Chinese are increasingly aware of it too – advertisements for bottled Tibetan water now adorn the backs of passenger train seats and other common locations, offering an icon of primitive purity of a type long familiar to Western consumers.) And hydro projects in this very mountainous region offer enormous potential rewards in electricity as well as in water supply. How much electricity water can generate is directly proportional to how far it falls into the turbines: the Yangzi completes 90% of its drop to the sea before it even leaves Tibet to enter China proper, and the Yellow River 80% of its decline before it leaves Inner Mongolia.22 On April 21, the Chinese government announced plans for 20 additional hydro projects on the upper Yangzi and its tributaries; if they are all completed, they would theoretically add 66% to the already existing hydropower capacity on the river (which includes Three Gorges).23

But secondly, the western route also poses by far the biggest complications. It is here that the engineering challenges are most complex and the solutions most untested. It is here (and in nearby Yunnan) that the needs of agrarian and industrial China collide most directly with the lives of Tibetans, Yi, Miao, and other minority groups. It is here that the environmental risks of dam building become major international issues, with enormous implications for the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra and other rivers relied on by hundreds of millions of South and Southeast Asians. And it is here that major water projects – which always include many uncertainties – collide with what has always been an extraordinarily fragile environment, and one which now faces far more than the average amount of extra uncertainty from climate change: Tibet, home to by far the largest glaciers outside the two polar regions, is expected to warm at twice the average global rate during the 21st century.24

State-building and Dam-building in the Himalayas

From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, China built plenty of dams, but relatively few of them were in the far west. This may seem surprising, given the concentration of hydro potential in that region, but makes perfect sense in other terms. The need to maximize energy production was less urgently felt before the boom of the 1990s, and there was much less concern about relying on coal (which still provides 80% of China's electricity25). Many of the dams that were built were constructed by mobilizing large amounts of labor (especially off-season peasant labor) in place of scarce capital, and it was a lot easier to use that labor close to home than to send it far away. The supporting infrastructure (e.g. roads) and technology for dam building in remote mountain locations was not available; the far reaches of the upper Yangzi were not even surveyed until the late 1970s. And the government was much more ambivalent about rapid development in the far west than it is today, with some leaders prioritizing more paternalistic policies that would avoid radical cultural change as the best formula for assuring political stability in the region.

But in the last two decades, all of this has changed, leading to a sharp shift towards the building of huge dam projects in Yunnan and Tibet above all. The technical capacities and supporting infrastructure needed for capital-intensive projects in these areas are now available; the pressure to increase domestic supplies of energy (and other resources, including of course water) has become intense; and the regime has clearly decided that raising incomes in the far west is the best way to keep control and make use of those territories – even if the wrenching cultural changes, massive Han immigration, and severe inequalities accompanying this development increase conflict in the short to medium term. For better or worse, a kind of paternalism in western frontier policy dating back to at least the Qing (albeit one that has long been gradually weakening) is now being discarded quite decisively. Meanwhile, changes in the relationships among the central government, provincial governments, and private investors have helped create enormous opportunities to gain both power and profit through accelerated dam building.

Plans to "send western electricity east," with a particular focus on developing Yunnan hydropower for booming Guangdong, date back to the 1980s; seasonal deliveries of power began in 1993.26  ...

Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in the far Southwest are likely to be the most affected. An unconfirmed report by the Tibetan government-in-exile says that at least 6 Tibetan women were recently shot by security forces as they protested a hydro project on the Tibet/Sichuan border.33 ...

The Other Side(s) of the Mountains: Pakistan, India, Nepal, Burma, Vietnam

Of course, people and governments further downstream also use rivers that start in the Himalayas – and many have plans to do so much more intensively. Many of them are very worried about Chinese initiatives that may preempt their own current or future water usage.

On December 9, 2008, Asia Times Online reported that China was planning to go ahead with a major hydroelectric dam and water diversion scheme on the great bend of the Yalong Zangbo River in Tibet.38 The 40,000 megawatt hydro project itself raises huge issues for Tibetans and for China. But what matters most for people outside China is that the plan not only calls for impounding huge amounts of water behind a dam, but also for changing the direction that the water flows beyond the dam – so that it would eventually feed into the South-North diversion project. The water that would be diverted currently flows south into Assam to help form the Brahmaputra, which in turn joins the Ganges to form the world's largest river delta, supplying much of the water to a basin with over 300 million inhabitants. While South Asians have worried for some time that China might divert this river, the Chinese government had denied any such intentions, reportedly doing so again when Hu Jintao visited New Delhi in 2006. However, rumors that China was indeed planning to begin such a project soon continued to circulate. (As we will see later, some Indian essays published in 2007 already assumed that China would make a major diversion from the Brahmaputra, citing this as a reason for India not to proceed with its own plan to transfer water from the Brahmaputra to other river basins south and west of it.) Indian Prime Minister Singh reportedly raised the issue during his January 2008 visit to Beijing, but a December, 2008 report from Asia Times Online said that China provided no assurances this time, and is in fact planning to divert the river. (No public statement was made at that time, but fewer official denials have been issued; the latest came former water minister Wang Shucheng on May 26, 2009.) Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has said that water scarcity is a threat to the "very survival of the Chinese nation." Interestingly, unconfirmed reports back in 2000 had suggested that Beijing had already decided to go ahead; but not until 2009, when the Three Gorges would be completely finished.39

Water is indeed a matter of survival – not only for China, but for its neighbors. Most of Asia's major rivers – the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, and Indus – draw on the glaciers and snowmelt of the Himalayas, and all of these except the Ganges have their source on the Chinese side of the border in Tibet. In many of these cases, no international agreements exist for sharing the waters of those rivers that cross borders, or even sharing data about them. ...

India, like China, has both extremely dry areas and some with plenty of water; and, as we have seen, it is also like China in that it is currently mining groundwater to produce important grain surpluses in some of these dry areas. So it may be no surprise that, like China, it is also contemplating a major scheme for diverting water from some river basins to others. The most ambitious, Himalayan, part of its Interlinking of Rivers Project would move water from the upper parts of the Ganges, Yamuna (a major tributary of the Ganges) and Brahmaputra Rivers westward, ending in the Luni and Sabarmati Rivers in Rajahstan and Gujarat. (Other Northwestern areas that would receive water are in Haryana and Punjab; a second, Peninsular, part of the project would mostly direct water to dry parts of Orissa and Tamil Nadu.) And just as China seems to be retreating from its earlier representations to India that it had no plans to divert water from the Yalong Zangbo/Brahmaputra, so this project suggests that India is hedging on its formal promises to Bangladesh (including a written understanding from 1996) that no water would be diverted away from the Ganges above the barrage at Farakka (a few kilometers from the India/Bangladesh border).70 ...

Late in January, Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a sobering piece (China Dialogue, January 22, 2009, link) about how accelerating the construction of dams in China's Southwest – part of the P.R.C.'s ambitious stimulus package to fight the global recession – is worsening the already considerable environmental and social risks involved, with some projects beginning before any Environmental Impact Assessments have been completed. Protests against Three Gorges by some leading scientists and engineers did not stop that project;108 it remains to be seen whether they will have more effect in the future. Recent reports that some poorly built dams on the Yellow River in Gansu – and perhaps many others elsewhere in China – are in dire need of repair109 -- may strengthen people, both within and outside the government, who are urging a more cautious approach to further mega-projects, but the outcome of such arguments remains unclear.

In short the possible damage to China's neighbors from this approach to its water and energy needs is staggeringly large – and the potential to raise political tensions is commensurate. Previous water diversion projects affecting the source of the Mekong have already drawn protests from Vietnam (and from environmental groups), and, as noted above, a project on the Nu River (which becomes the Salween in Thailand and Burma) which was suspended in the face of significant domestic and foreign opposition in 2004 and then re-started, has recently been halted again by order of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.110 But some projects now underway or being contemplated have considerably larger implications, both for Chinese and for foreigners. The diversion of the Yalong Zangbo – if that is indeed on the agenda – would have the largest implications of all. If the waters could arrive in North China safely and relatively unpolluted – by no means sure things -- and having generated considerable power along the way, the relief for China's seriously strained hydro-ecology would be considerable. On the other hand, the impact on Eastern India and Bangladesh, with a combined population even larger than North China's, could be devastating. The potential for such a project to create conflicts between China and India –and to exacerbate existing conflicts over shared waterways between India and Bangladesh – is gigantic. ...

This article was written for The Asia-Pacific Journal and for New Left Review where it appears simultaneously. The version here includes the complete notes, maps and illustrations.

Recommended citation: Kenneth Pomeranz, "The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 30-2-09, July 27, 2009.

Notes

1 Sean Daily, "Mass Farmer Suicide Sobering Reminder of Consequences of Water Shortages," Belfast Telegraph, April 15, 2009, re-posted here.
2 On Zipingpu and the earthquake, see Sharon La Franiere, "Possible Link Between Dam and China Quake," New York Times, February 6, 2009,; Richard Kerr and Richard Stone, "A Human Trigger for the Great Quake of Sichuan," Science 323: 5912 (January 16, 2009), p. 322, summarizing both Chinese and American papers suggesting this. See also "Early Warning" a [piece by Evan Osnos of the New Yorker about the Chinese Engineer Fan Xiao, who had warned of such a possibility and was one of the first to suggest publicly that it had actually happened: February 6, 2009. A number of scientists had warned several years ago that the reservoirs of the Three Gorges Dam might trigger earthquakes, though on a much smaller scale than the quake that Zipingpu may have caused. See Gavan McCormack, "Water Margins: Competing Paradigms in China," Critical Asian Studies 33:1 (March, 2001), .p. 13
3 Sudha Ramachandran, "Greater China: India Quakes Over China's Water Plan," Asia Times Online, December 9, 2008.
4 For reasons of brevity, I am omitting rivers that flow east or northeast from the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau and wind up in Central Asia.
5 See for instance "Experts Warn China's Water Supply May well Run Dry," South China Morning Post, September 1, 2003, available here. ...
23 Calculated from data in "China To Build 20 Hydro Dams on Yangtze River," Associated Press, April 21, 2009, distributed by China Dams List, internationalrivers.org
24 Timothy Gardner, "Tibetan Glacial Shrink to Cut Water Supply by 2050," Reuters, January 6, 2009, citing the glaciologist Lonnie Thompson.
25 Keith Bradsher, "China Far Outpaces US in clearer Coal-Fired Plants," New York Times, May 11, 2009.
26 Darrin Magee, "Powershed Politics: Yunnan Hydropower Under Great Western Development," China Quarterly 185 (March, 2006), p. 25
27 Magee, p. 26; Grainne Ryder, "Skyscraper Dams in Yunnan: China's New Electricity Regulator Should Step In,' Probe International Special Report, May 12, 2006, page 3, available here.
28 Magee, p 35. For a useful timeline of China's electrical power reforms, see John Dore and Yu Xiaogang, "Yunnan Hydropower Expansion" (working paper Chiang Mai University's Unit for Social and Environmental Research and Green Watershed, Kunming, March 2004), p. 13. ...

(5) China urges US to halt surveillance near its shores

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\08\28\story_28-8-2009_pg4_1

Friday, August 28, 2009

China urges US to halt surveillance near its shores

Chinese Defence Ministry says US should change its surveillance and survey operations policies to resolve Sino-US maritime ‘incidents'

BEIJING: China called on the United States to reduce and eventually halt air and sea military surveillance close to its shores after a series of territorial disputes this year.

The request was made during a special session on maritime safety between the two countries' militaries on Wednesday and Thursday, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday, citing China's Defence Ministry.

Five times this year, Chinese vessels have confronted US surveillance ships in Asian waters, the US Defence Department said in May. China said the US vessels had intruded its territory. There has since been a sixth incident.

"China believes the constant US military air and sea surveillance and survey operations in China's exclusive economic zone had led to military confrontations between the two sides," the ministry said.

‘Incidents': "The way to resolve China-US maritime incidents is for the US to change its surveillance and survey operations policies against China, decrease and eventually stop such operations."

Susan Stevenson, spokeswoman at the US Embassy in Beijing, confirmed the request.

"Our position has not changed," Stevenson said, citing a US Undersecretary of Defence Michele Flournoy statement during a June visit to China that the US "exercises its freedom of navigation while putting emphasis on taking care to avoid any unwanted incidents".

The United States maintains on principle that waters beyond 12 miles offshore are open to all shipping, while China holds that the US should not trespass within its 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

In March, five Chinese vessels approached the USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea about 75 miles from Hainan Island in March, after hassling that ship, as well as the ocean surveillance ship Victorious in the Yellow Sea, in previous days.

In May, two Chinese fishing vessels confronted the Victorious again.

In June, a Chinese submarine collided with an underground sonar array being towned by the destroyer USS John McCain, near Subic Bay in the Philippines. The most serious recent confrontation between China and the US was in 2001, when a US naval surveillance aircraft flying about 70 miles off Hainan collided with a Chinese fighter and was forced to land on Hainan Island. reuters

(6) New Japanese PM favours EU-style single regional currency in Asia

From: orm <ormg1@bigpond.com> Date: 02.09.2009 06:59 AM

The New Japanese Prime Minister and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi

Sept. 1 (LPAC)--The head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) Yukio Hatoyama, who will be named Prime Minister on Sep. 14 in the wake of his party having swept the Parliamentary elections on Aug. 30, is a follower of Europe's founding advocate of an imperial European State, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, and an advocate of creating an EU-modeled single regional currency in Asia. Hotayama is a member of one of the wealthiest families in Japan, and the fourth generation of political leaders. His maternal grandfather, Shojiro Ishibashi, was the founder of Bridgestone Corp., the world's largest tiremaker (Ishibashi -- ishi means "stone", and bashi, "bridge"). His grandfather, Ichiro Hatoyama, was Prime Minister from 1954-56, and founded the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which ruled Japan almost uninterruptedly since the Pacific War, until last Sunday. That grandfather also translated Count Coudenhove-Kalergi's "The Totalitarian State Against Man" into Japanese.

In an essay published in early August on his worldview, at the peak of the electoral campaign, Hatoyama portrayed himself as a firm opponent of "American-style free-market economics," and of globalization, which he repeatedly labels as an American policy. Hatoyama attacks "unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation," contrasting this to the "fraternite" of the French Revolution. He attacks the LDP for sponsoring the failed reforms of Junichiro Koizumi, while contrasting his Democratic Party as a defender of the "social safety net and traditional economic activities."

His proposed solutions are pure Fabian. Declaring the end of "U.S.-led globalism," and concerned about CHina's rise as the next dominant world power, Hatoyama calls for establishing an Asian regional currency on the model of the EU, which he believes can be acheived within ten years. "The experience of the E.U. shows us how regional integration can defuse territorial disputes." He concludes with a quote from Coudenhove-Kalergi, whom he praises as the "founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe," on the importance of "utopian dreams" in history.