According to a report in the Guardian of March 7, 2019, urban planners in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, have drawn up proposals to pipe water into the chronically parched region from Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake on earth. China is considering plans to build a 1,000km (620 mile) pipeline to pump water all the way from Siberia to its drought-stricken northwest.

Li Luoli, Vice President of the China Society of Economic Reform, a state-run think tank and one of the architects of the mega-project, said it was theoretically feasible and “certainly beneficial” to China.

He said “Once the technical issues are resolved, diplomats should sit down and talk to each other about how each party would benefit from such international cooperation.” The project pipeline would begin at the southwestern tip of the 600km-long Russian lake and run about 1,000km, across Mongolia, to Gansu’s capital through the Hexi corridor, a desert region near the westernmost tip of the Great Wall of China. Plans to pipe in Siberian water, which are likely to alarm conservationists, are not the first of their kind. Last year Russia’s agriculture minister, Alexander Tkachev, suggested pumping water across Kazakhstan to Xinjiang, another dry northwestern region, but only “under the condition of full compliance with the interests of Russia, including environmental”. Citing scientists in Siberia, Russia’s state news agency Tass said “fresh water supplies in China could be a promising area of Russia exports”. Wang Hao, head of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydro-Power Research, told the Global Times it would hinge on “political and diplomatic issues”.

Li Luoli conceded more research was needed but said action was needed to address China’s water shortage. He said “The government should attach great importance to water resources of which there is a severe scarcity ... and for which there are no alternatives.”

(Comment: In 2005 China’s former Minister of Water Resources, Wang Shucheng, warned that by 2020 many northern cities, including the capital, might run out of water. In an attempt to address the problem, in 2014 China inaugurated one of the biggest engineering feats in history -- the £48bn South-North Water Diversion, a huge web of canals and reservoirs to shift trillions of gallons of water each year from southern China to its water-deprived north. The project, first conceived by Mao, was only approved in 2002.)