4. Harnessing and Exploitation

Harnessing of the Yellow River has always been a great challenge for the Chinese people. Flood prevention was necessary for the prosperity of the nation and livelihood of the people in the Yellow River Valley.

Historically, the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River have been hit by continuous flood disasters. The most damaging feature of this disaster is the break-off water discharge in the lower reach of the river.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the strategies of harnessing the Yellow River have been developed and improved. Different strategies and technologies have been adopted in different periods: "keeping a broad flood plain with solid embankment" was implemented in the early days of the PRC; "disaster relief and water conservancy rejuvenating; water storage and sediment control" was implemented in the 1950s and 1960s; "trapping in the upper reach and discharging in the lower reach, separate detention on both banks" was implemented during the 1970s.

The utilization and protection of water supplies stimulated the need for water resource exploration and conservation. The strategy for water and soil conservation is to combine prevention and control; make areas receiving the most sediment the focus; and take the small valley as the basic unit. In addition, by using comprehensive methods from engineering, biology, and agriculture, careful attention was paid to the construction of the backbone for ditch control.

The development and improvement of harnessing strategies of the Yellow River plays a guiding role in controlling and exploring the Yellow River.

The dike is the main engineering solution created to prevent floods on the Yellow River.

Dikes have been built to control the river's flood runoff for millennia. Around 200 A.D. an effort was made to link up all the dike sections into a complete system. It was indeed a marvel in civil engineering, comparable in grandeur to the building of the Great Wall.

The dikes successfully protected the river's lower reach for eight centuries, with only relatively infrequent dike breaches. However it is not a simple matter to interrupt nature's plain-building process. The heavy sediment load brought down with the flood water started to accumulate in the flood plain between the dikes, raising the riverbed to such an elevation that it would be many meters above that of the surrounding land, turning it into a "suspended river."

The core focus for control of the river is the prevention of floods. Attention to clean river water irrigation and the safety of people living in the alluvial plain is also a part of flood prevention. These last several years have seen hundreds of million Yuan in local funds invested to regulate shoal protection works, groyne, battlement, bank revetment and other river improvement works.

Finally, water resources are abundant in the basin; as a result, a series of hydropower plants were built or are under construction - the Longyangxia, Liujiaxia, Bapanxia, Lijiaxia, Daxia, Sanmenxia, and Xiaolangdi Hydropower Plant.

Editor:Yang Jie