Beijing Scientists Float Idea of a Tianjin-Beijing Canal to Tackle Water Deficit

Tom Arnstein | Jun 24, 2014 4:00 pm | 3 comments | 1411 reads

After last week’s onslaught of thunderstorms, you may be forgiven for thinking that Beijing is fairly aqua-quenched, but in fact, every year the capital is short 1.5 billion cubic meters of water needed to sustain its 21 million citizens. As reported by Forbes and put forward by Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, the solution may be a 160km-long, one-kilometer-wide canal that links Beijing to the sea. Bye bye ring roads!

The canal would be big enough to house 30,000 ton ships, that would sail up from Tianjin and effectively make Beijing a new seaport as well provide easy access to make up the current water deficit. The report also suggests that the water that evaporates from the passage would both cool surrounding areas and dampen the ongoing southerly encroachment of the Gobi Desert.

Now for why everyone else says this would be a bad idea: salinization of the surrounding land would make it unfit for anything, and the canal would basically act as a one-way (the wrong way) industrial enema, bringing all of the pollution found around Bohai up to the city. Luckily, Beijing sits at a higher altitude to the East China Sea so without an impressive anti-gravity jet system (or magic) the canal wouldn’t work anyway.

The article points out that Beijing’s current piping system allows for a half of all its content to be lost somewhere along the way – maybe something to focus on before cutting the country into pieces?

For now, let's lump this in with the unlikely events of China building a railway under the Bering Strait, the Beijing subway getting Wi-Fi by the end of next month, and maybe even the smooth release of Transformers 4 on Friday.

Read more about Beijing's dire water situation here.