The development, challenges and management of groundwater in rural China

The history of groundwater in China is one of extremes, or apparent extremes. Before the 1960s, the story was one of neglect; only a small fraction of China’s water supply came from groundwater (Nickum, 1988). Almost none of the Ministry of Water Resource’s investment funds were allocated to the ground-water sector until the late 1960s. Certainly, to the extent that underground water resources were valuable, China was ignoring a valuable resource.Since the mid-1970s, however, the prominence of the groundwater sector has risen dramatically. Over the last 30 years, agricultural producers, factory managers and city officials – far from ignoring groundwater resources – have entered an era of exploitation (Smil, 1993; Brown and Halweil, 1998). Arguably, there have been more tube wells sunk in China over the last quar-ter century than anywhere else in the world. As a share of total water supply, ground water has risen from a negligible amount across most of China to being a primary source of water for agriculture, industry and domestic use in many of the nation’s most productive regions. Unfortunately, the resulting fall in ground-water tables has been one of China’s most serious environmental problems (World Bank, 1997).Despite the rise in importance of the sector, and the threats to its continua-tion, relatively little systematic information is available about many key aspects of China’s groundwater economy in rural areas. That is not to say that there is a shortage of scientific research studies that document some of China’s groundwater-related problems, for example, land subsidence, salt water intrusion and overdrafts (Chen