It's 2050 and a deadly heatwave in Asia sparks debate about the unequal way China’s water is shared out. How will the country’s ageing rulers react?
Each of these climate-change articles is fiction, but grounded in historical fact and real science. The year, concentration of carbon dioxide and average temperature rise are shown for each one. The scenarios do not present a unified narrative but are set in different worlds, with a range of climate sensitivities, on different emissions pathwaysheatwave that has gripped Asia for five months has had many unexpected consequences.
In the documentary, Yu the Great is praised for realising that floods cannot be defeated with man-made barriers—the failed approach repeatedly tried by his own father, Lord Gun—but must be harnessed and guided, by building channels. Viewers could not fail to grasp that stubborn, purblind Gun is a proxy for China’s ageing rulers, who draw their authority from the military high command and from Xi Jinping, the country’s unseen and silent 97-year-old paramount leader.
Scarcity of water even complicates China’s hold over the great territorial prize of the Xi era, the island of Taiwan. Seven years after being retaken in the short, brutal war of 2043, after an isolationist America said that it would no longer defend it, the island is a harshly policed shadow of its former self. A lack of water has thwarted plans to bring over more mainland settlers.
China’s relations with India have been patched up and water-sharing treaties signed between the two nuclear powers, as glaciers high in the Himalaya melt at a dangerous rate. Smaller neighbours have been less fortunate. Brushing aside complaints from Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, China has hoarded water behind its dams in the upper reaches of the Mekong and other vital rivers, then bought an uneasy peace by selling neighbours cheap electricity from those dams.
Wider public opinion began to sour on the Water Census when a second survey, completed in 2042, handed arid, red-coded identity cards to millions of Chinese from the majority Han ethnic group, triggering a fresh wave of coerced relocations. Farmers from northern and central provinces were obliged to sign family plots of land over to the government in exchange for subsidies to help them start new lives in green-coded regions where the population is allowed to grow.
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