To keep Beijing lush, a huge project is diverting water from rural China - but it risks causing a wasteland.
In an arid northern Chinese township several hundred kilometres from the capital Beijing, the ground is cracked and dusty, just this side of out-and-out desert. It hasn't rained in this part of Hebei since August, and the Year of the Rat will not be a bumper year for Liu Haishui's peach crop. He shifts a fearsome-looking blade to his left hand, lights a cigarette and pushes back his baseball cap. The lack of water is frustrating. In the good years, when it rains three or four times, the trees can yield 500 peaches, but this year it's looking more like 300.
Water is always a problem in Hebei, and though the local reservoir provides most of his needs, there is barely enough to go around.
"It's much drier than it used to be, hard to make a living. If it rains a couple of times a year it's okay, but everything is getting drier around here," says Liu, whose name "Haishui" translates as "lake water".
His words are drowned out by a Dongfeng truck carrying rocks and dirt from an earthworks project at the edge of his farm, where workers are working all hours to complete a canal project that will pump 300 million cubic metres of water from Hebei's already depleted reserves to Beijing to make sure that everything looks lush and green for the Olympics in 2008. Project bosses say the canal, running 309 kilometres through Hebei, will be finished by April, and there is no reason to doubt them: progress is swift.
The problem is that there is little enough water in Hebei to share.
Liu comes from nearby Xianbei village and he runs a shop as a side business, as the farming is too tough, he says. Profits on the farm are around 3,000 yuan (€279) a year. The farmers who lost their land were compensated to the tune of 200 yuan (€18.60) a mature tree, and they received 28,000 yuan (€2,600) per mu of land (a mu is a Chinese measurement of land, with one mu equalling 667 square metres). It should have been 60,000 yuan (€5,580), probably, but Liu is not complaining and is happy for the water to go to the games. "The Olympics will be great. I'm going. If I don't get tickets, I'll go to Beijing anyway," he says.
For many years, Hebei has shared its water with the capital, which has a population of 17 million people.
And there should be enough water when Liu gets there. The problem is that, longer-term, the capital is facing a major water crisis. Beijing has been affected by drought for 10 years - reservoirs have dried up or been badly depleted, water tables have sunk to unprecedentedly low levels, and Beijing faces a shortfall of one billion cubic metres of water by 2010.
Just 10 years ago, you could dig 10 metres to find water- now it's nearly 20 metres.
Alarmed by the looming water crisis in an Olympic year, the government has spent 17.4 billion yuan (€1.6bn) on the canal. When it is complete it will be crossed by 118 bridges and link Shijiazhuang in Hebei province to the capital, diverting 300-500 million cubic metres of water from four Hebei reservoirs next year.
This plan to irrigate the capital's Olympic ambitions is a part of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, which will tap the Yangtze River and tributaries by 2010 to water the arid north. Water demand is expected to be 2.75 million cubic metres every day during the Games, a rise of 30 per cent.
As in other parts of the country where the growing water shortage is wreaking havoc, the government has ordered farmers to stop growing crops and paid them to do so. The reservoirs still cover basic needs but water is a constant worry in this part of China. Open mines have made much of the water unusable.
A lot of the wells and underground rivers have also gone as the water table gets ever lower, says one farmer who gives only his surname, Chen.
"There used to be lots of rivers around here, small ones that we could use. But they've all dried up now," he says, wearing the blue jacket and Mao cap that used to be ubiquitous in China but are now mostly worn by farmers and the rural poor. "Last year wasn't too bad, but it's getting less and less every year."
Chen is examining his land, getting ready to plant corn in April, and his young grandson has come along to help him and his wife. Granny teases the youngster, making him chase some rolled-up paper through tinder-dry stalks in the fields. The chances of this little boy staying in this town when he grows up are remote. And even if he does find work around here, there is a chance there will be no water left to slake his thirst.