The gigantic and long-awaited Dongjiang-Shenzhen Water Supply Improvement Project began providing clean drinking water to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on Saturday.
Clean water from the upper reaches of Dongjiang River, one of major branches of the Pearl River, is now supplied to neighboring Hong Kong via the 57.1 kilometer-long closed-pipeline, avoiding pollution on its way.
Huang Huahua, governor of Guangdong, said: "The huge project ensures Hong Kong compatriots will be able to have enough quality and safe drinking water from Guangdong Province."
Donald Tsang, chief secretary for Administration of Hong Kong, said the project is a special gift of great significant to Hong Kong that will celebrate the sixth anniversary of its return to the motherland tomorrow.
Zhang Dejiang, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Party secretary of Guangdong Province, Lu Zhonghe, chairman of the Guangdong Provincial People's Congress, Suo Lisheng, deputy minister of water conservancy, and other senior officials from the mainland and Hong Kong also attended the project's opening ceremony.
The project, which began construction in August 2000, cost more than 4.9 billion yuan (US$590 million).
Hong Kong has provided low-interest-rate loans valued at about HK$2.3 billion (US$295 million) to the project.
It will be able to divert 2.4 billion cubic meters of water annually. Of the total, 1.1 billion cubic meters will go to Hong Kong, while Shenzhen and Dongguan in the lower reaches of Dongjiang River will receive 873 million and 400 million cubic meters respectively.
The project has its origins in 1964 when late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai decided to grant special funding to build the project to supply drinking water to Hong Kong, where fresh water is in short supply.
Guangdong Province has, so far, sold more than 14 billion cubic meters of drinking water to Hong Kong by the end of last month.
The province used to annually provide only about 800,000 cubic meters of water to Hong Kong before the 1980s. It is expected to sell more than 10 million cubic meters of water to the region this year, accounting for more than 80 percent of Hong Kong's total drinking water.
(China Daily June 30, 2003)
