CHINA: IRRIGATION SPEEDS MARCH OF THE TAKLAMAKAN DESERT
By Antoaneta Bezlova - Asia Water Wire*
30 October 2006
Inter Press Service

HOTAN, Oct. 30, 2006 (IPS/GIN) -- It takes two people to keep watch on the desert road which emerges from the sands and disappears back into the sands. The roadside cabin where they live -- the sole dwelling visible -- is a well station, identified only as 'No. 27.'

"Life in the desert is too lonely for a single man," explains Gong Kailong, who despite his weather-beaten looks is not a desert native but hails from Gansu in inland China. He is posted here together with his wife. Besides a brood of chickens, sheltered from the heat in the highway toilet, there are no other living creatures in sight.

Their job is simple enough -- to look after the well, which feeds hundreds of snake-like pipes irrigating the vegetation belt that helps keep the sands from burying the road. But what make this posting a challenge are the surroundings. They are in the middle of one of the most inhospitable deserts on earth -- the Taklamakan Desert in China's far west Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, whose name means "you can go in but never come out."

The cross-desert highway itself is nothing short of a technological miracle -- by far China's most audacious attempt to conquer Taklamakan, the world's second largest desert, after Africa's Sahara.

It was built in the mid-1990s to help in the extraction of oil underneath the sands and stretches more than 500 kilometers from north to south across the desert. The famed Silk Road trade, which dates back some 2,000 years, went around Taklamakan, following routes with oases stops on the northern and southern fringes of the desert.

Yet, to build a modern highway in a sea of sands was not enough. The road needed protection against the shifting desert that threatened to engulf it bit by bit.

A green belt of anti-desertification plant species such as Chinese tamarisk, honey tree and sacsaoul was planted in 2003 all along the road to hold off the sands.

The water to irrigate the plants was drawn from underground and pumped through a web of pipes that run for kilometers along the green belt. Some 114 well stations were built to extract the water. And daring couples had to be found to do the caretaker work.

The pay is 600 yuan (76 U.S. dollars) per month, says Long Fen, 48, who inhabits well station No. 96 farther south on the desert highway. It is still more than what she would normally earn in her native province of Sichuan in central China.

Yet the feeling of being totally cut off is sometimes too much even for two people to bear. Long Fen and her husband do not own a vehicle and have to wait for a truck to deliver fresh produce and daily necessities. During summer the ground temperature soars to 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit) and one can allegedly cook an egg in the scorching sand.

The only company the couple occasionally have are the employees of PetroChina, the state oil giant that operates the oil fields in the middle of the desert. They stop by the station to stretch out and have a chat. But while the oil drilling teams do only 15-day shifts in the desert and go back to recuperate at Korla, the nearest city, Long Fen and her husband are here for longer spells.

"A year, or two, who knows?" says Long. "We will stay as long as we can."

Their daily fight against the desert mirrors that of thousands of people in Xinjiang region, which is home to China's Uygur Muslim population. The arid areas of Xinjiang account for about 60 percent of the desert that chokes China's land. More than a quarter of Xinjiang is covered in desert.

An ever-rising tide of sand is threatening to accelerate the spread of barren wasteland to the heart of China. Some 3,900 square kilometers of land turn to sand each year. Nearly all of northern China, including the capital Beijing, is at risk.

Local government leaders say the harvesting of desert plants is the main reason for the unstoppable march of the sands.

"In the past, peasants used to uproot the desert vegetation and burn it as firewood during the winter months," says Zhang Tao, deputy director of the afforestation department of Bazhou prefecture, which includes the desert highway.

Plants like rose willow that can resist drought and contain the march of the shifting sands were all harvested. Another anti-desertification vegetation, Populus euphratica (Indian poplar), which grew in thick clusters along the Tarim River, was also cut down by farmers and burned for heating and cooking.

The cutting and harvesting has been particularly severe in southwestern areas like Hotan and Kashgar where there is no coal. China relies on coal for more than 70 percent of its energy needs.

Ironically, Xinjiang has one of the richest oil and gas reserves in China. The Karamay and Tarim basins have been supplying inland China with oil and gas since the 1980s. A huge pipeline, China's biggest, was completed in early 2004 to transport natural gas from the Tarim basin in Taklamakan Desert through six inland provinces to Shanghai, Beijing and other cities on the east coast.

Only now is some of the generated gas being channeled to the local population for use. "We hope this would put a stop (to) the harvesting and cutting," says Zhang Tao.

The Indian poplar, now near extinction, has been designated a national protection species and the government has spearheaded a campaign for the restoration of poplar forests along the Tarim. Over the last decade the river, which is known as the mother river of Xinjiang, has had lengthy periods of running dry -- a trend the government hopes to reverse.

Many of the initiated measures might be coming too late to save Xinjiang ecology. A lot has been destroyed already because of the government-led campaign in the 1950s and 1960s to cultivate and irrigate huge swathes of land in Xinjiang.

In a traditionally arid area where the annual rainfall is just 58 centimeters, huge collective farms were established and tunnels dug to bring underground water. With the available water resources monopolized for farming, nearly all other land became desert.

"We face an adverse battle in fighting the deserts," admitted Wang Lequan, party chief of the autonomous region in an interview in the region's capital Urumqi in October.

Despite the water challenge, regional leaders have ambitious plans for the future development of Xinjiang as China's biggest petrochemical center. Because of its location, which positions it as the natural route of any pipeline from the Central Asian states, Xinjiang would transport and process a sizable chunk of any imported crude.

Plans for at least three oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and Russia crossing Xinjiang have been announced as China intensifies its quest to secure and diversify energy supplies for its fast growing economy.

But Kazakh ecologists are warning that China's unbridled consumption of water could have serious consequences for both Kazakhstan and Russia. If water is drawn off from the shared rivers Ili and Irtysh at the present rate to feed Xinjiang's burgeoning economy, parts of Kazakhstan could face an environmental disaster, and Lake Balkhash could turn into a second Aral Sea, which has shrunk to one-fourth its original size. (*Asia Water Wire, coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific, is a series of features on water and development in the Asia-Pacific.)

East Turkestan groups may be responsible for Xinjiang oil tank blast - HK paper
30 October 2006
BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

Text of report by unnamed staff reporter entitled: "Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy: Xinjiang independence elements involved in blowing up oil depot", published by Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily (Ping Kuo Jih Pao) website on 30 October; subheadings as published

The "Xinjiang independence" movement, which once declared that it would promote independence for Xinjiang by way of violence and bloodshed, recently turned active again and might be connected to the oil depot explosion that took place on the evening before last [28 October] in Xinjiang's Karamay City. The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy yesterday alleged that the explosion left 17 people dead and three wounded and did not rule out human sabotage as the cause. It reckoned that Xinjiang independence elements might be involved. However, the official Xinhua Wang [Xinhua Net - Xinhua News Agency website] reported that the explosion was caused by anticorrosion works being improperly carried out at the oil depot and noted that the known number of deaths should be 12.

Karamay City's Dushanzi District, where the oil depot explosion took place, is close to China's frontier with Kazakhstan. The locality has in recent years vigorously developed the oil refining and petrochemical industries and is an important transit point for China's oil importation from Kazakhstan. The Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy yesterday quoted a functionary of the local fire brigade as saying the oil depot explosion on the evening before last caused a total of 17 deaths. Nevertheless, the functionary concerned did not utter a single word about the cause of the mishap.

Hospital refuses to reveal conditions of the wounded

Meanwhile, officials of the public security bureau and the general office of the government of Dushanzi District, when receiving relevant inquiries, indicated that they had to keep the incident secret because they received instructions from the higher-ups; the local hospital also firmly refused to reveal the conditions of the wounded people admitted.

The Information Centre noted: The explosion this time is suspicious and the involvement of political factors behind it is not ruled out. With rifles in their hands, three members of the "East Turkestan Liberation Organization", a Xinjiang independence organization, in September last year declared that they would promote independence for Xinjiang through armed struggle and said they would sabotage China's oil facilities to stop it from plundering natural resources in Xinjiang.

After the incident the Chinese government was all nerves and continuously strengthened vigilance in Xinjiang. At the end of last year 10,000 troops of the No 7 Mobile Division of the Armed Police Force were transferred to Mt Tianshan to conduct counterterrorism exercises. Furthermore, in August this year China conducted the "Tianshan One" joint exercises in conjunction with Kazakhstan.

Authorities say paint volatilization causes accident

Yesterday the Xinhua Wang, in a rare move, swiftly reported the cause of this explosion, saying that the oil depot's oil storage tank, which was hit by the accident, was still under construction; an accident occurred on the day before yesterday when a flash explosion was produced by the volatilization of organic substances in the corrosion-resistant paint used by the workers, who were carrying out anticorrosion works. The internal surface of the oil storage tank was damaged but the tank body was not. At the time 24 people were working at the scene. As of yesterday afternoon the authorities found a total of 12 dead bodies, eight of which were fragmentary, at the scene. It was preliminarily affirmed that another 12 people were wounded.

The report also quoted sources as saying that after its completion the oil storage tank would be used to store crude oil purchased from Kazakhstan by China and that this explosion had not interfered with the normal operation of the China-Kazakhstan crude oil pipeline.

It has been learned that China has in recent years actively carried out energy cooperation programmes with Kazakhstan. The cross-border oil pipeline constructed under cooperation between the two countries is 1,200 km in total length. The annual oil transportation capacity is estimated to be 20m metric tons and has now reached 10m metric tons.

Source: Apple Daily website, Hong Kong, in Chinese 30 Oct 06

ADB funds China's expressway construction
30 October 2006
Xinhua's China Economic Information Service

URUMQI, Oct. 30 (CEIS) -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide a 150 million U.S. dollar line of credit to allow China to build a 296.5-km-long section of a national highway in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Construction of the 3.9 billion-yuan (478.5 million U.S. dollars) expressway linking Korla city and Kuqa county is scheduled to begin in August next year and due to open to traffic in August 2010, according to local communication authorities.

The expressway project is part of a comprehensive action plan to boost Central Asia regional economic cooperation, covered by ADB investment between 2006 and 2008.

Early this year, ADB had promised to offer 600,000 U.S. dollars to boost preparation work for the Korla-Kuqa expressway, a section of the No. 314 national highway. The 1,880-km No. 314 national highway starts from Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, and ends at the Kunjirap Pass on the China-Pakistan border, traversing the Tianshan Mountains.

According to Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Regional Communications Bureau, the Korla-Kuqa expressway is also part of the Central Asia regional highway network.

The Korla-Kuqa expressway is expected to play an important role in promoting trade and economic exchanges between China and Central and Western Asian countries as well as between China and European countries. The expressway is also due to play a key role in boosting economic development in Xinjiang, according to the local communications bureau.

Xinjiang to build two railway projects in 2007
1 November 2006
Xinhua's China Economic Information Service

URUMQI, Nov.1 (CEIS) – China's National Development and Reform Commission has ratified the building of Kuytun-Beitun railway and expansion of Turpan-Korla railway, both in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the Urumqi Railway Administrative Bureau.

The two projects, involving 12 billion yuan of investment in total, will start construction in 2007.

The Kuytun-Beitun railway starts in Kuytun station where it joins the Lanzhou-Xinjiang railway, and ends in Beitun, via Karamay, Urho and Fuhai, with a total length of 462.85 km. As the state grade-II railway, the single-track railway is estimated to require a total investment of 5.5 billion yuan.

The capacity expansion of 457 km Turpan-Korla section of the Southern Xinjiang Railway, designed as state grade-I railway, is estimated to cost 6.45 billion yuan.

It is expected that the two projects would promote the construction of the Central Asia transportation network, improve the regional traffic in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, break the transportation bottleneck in the region.