Troubled Waters : Financial Times, Saturday July 19, 2014 Life and Arts, p. 1

The second article in the series, A World without Water, Pilita Clark reports on the Mekong river in China, which she claims occupies the "front line in the global battle over water" (p. 1). The Mekong River's headwaters, in the Tibetan plateau, starts a river that flows through China, to Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia,  Vietnam, and finally into the South China Sea.   In the Yunnan province, the area in China that the river flows, the Chinese government began damming the river over 20 years ago and built two large, newer ones, the Xiaowan and the Nuozhadu. Clark describes the dams:

"The Xiaowan, completed nearly four years ago, is one of China's biggest hydropower projects after Three Gorges on the Yangtze river with a wall almost as high as the Eiffel Tower and a reservoir that can hold 15bn cubic metres of water. It is dwarfed in volume, though not quite height, by the newer Nuozhadu dam, which can store 22.7bn cubic metres of water. Together the pair can hold enough to drown an area the size of London in water 24m deep" (p. 1). China's southern neighbors have attributed the consequences of these dams "for everything from drought to a drop-off in fish catches"(p. 1).

These two rivers, part of the 40 rivers in China, collectively supply this natural resource to more than a dozen of China's neighbors.  Because of the size of China's population, 20 per cent of the earth's total number, and its limited water resources, only six per cent of the total fresh water, China has aggressively "blocked, straightened, and diverted its rivers as part of an accelerating industrialisation drive" (p. 1). To power the drive, China has planned more dams to support factories in the east.

Clark documented some the environmental results of dams: "They block fish from migrating to their spawning grounds and, by releasing water in bursts, scour riverbeds and disrupt fish breeding patterns. They also trap nutrient-rich silt that is needed to keep downstream deltas fertile and stop them eroding" (p. 1).

The environmental and political strains between China and the countries with which it shares water will continue due to China's control of water through its dams, the reluctance of China to cooperate with its neighbors, and its unwillingness to share resource information. To further impede cooperation, China "was one of just three nations to vote against the UN's 1997 treaty governing shared international rivers and has never agreed to negotiate joint management of the Mekong" (p. 1).
Indeed, China has refused to join the Mekong River Commission, leaving the smaller, less powerful countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam as members.