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Breaking News | The CPC Central Committee and the State Council Have Issued the Outline for the Construction of the National Water Network


Managing and developing water resources brings benefits that endure for millennia. Recently, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the Outline for the Construction of the National Water Network. This top-level design sets out a grand blueprint for building the national water network, calling for accelerated efforts to establish such a network, develop a modern, high-quality water infrastructure system, and comprehensively address issues related to water resources, aquatic ecology, water environment, and water-related disasters.

Compared with the State Grid, the national highway network, and the high-speed rail network, the National Water Network is more than just an engineering infrastructure; it is a comprehensive system that takes natural rivers and lakes as its foundation, uses water diversion, allocation, and drainage projects as its conduits, relies on regulation and storage facilities as its nodes, and employs intelligent control as its means. It integrates functions such as optimal allocation of water resources, flood prevention and disaster reduction in river basins, and protection of aquatic ecosystems.

At present, China has built the world’s largest, most extensive, and most populous water infrastructure system. However, it must be recognized that the seasonal pattern of abundant summer floods and scarce winter flows, coupled with regional disparities—water scarcity in the north and abundance in the south—has long been a fundamental feature of China’s water situation. Compared with the requirements for building a modern, high-quality infrastructure system, the existing water engineering infrastructure still suffers from such shortcomings as weak systemic integration, inadequate standards, and a need to further enhance its level of intelligentization.

The Planning Outline sets forth the goal of basically establishing the overall framework of the National Water Network by 2035, with the main backbone and major arteries of the network gradually completed, and water networks at the provincial, municipal, and county levels substantially improved, thereby building a national water security assurance system that is commensurate with the basic realization of socialist modernization. To build this national water security assurance system, it is necessary to advance the construction of the National Water Network with high quality; to improve the water resource allocation and water supply security systems, adhering to the principles of prioritizing water conservation, operating within available water resources, and giving equal emphasis to both increasing water supply and reducing water consumption; to enhance the basin-level flood prevention and disaster reduction system; and to refine the governance system for the protection of river and lake ecosystems, firmly upholding the concept of ecological civilization, pursuing systematic, comprehensive, and source-based governance, accelerating the restoration of river and lake ecological environments, and enabling rivers to regain their vitality and river basins to once again teem with life.

The construction of the National Water Network is vital to the sustainable development of the Chinese nation. By advancing this initiative with high quality—through network interconnection, gap-filling, and supply-chain strengthening—we will establish the “framework” of the National Water Network, weave its “mesh,” and solidify its “nodes,” thereby creating a national water network that is “systematically complete and safe and reliable, intensive and efficient, green and smart, cyclically unimpeded, and orderly in regulation and control.” This will provide robust water-security support for the comprehensive building of a modern socialist country.

Keywords:

Outline of the National Water Network Construction Plan

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