Water Resource Development and Ecological Reclaim in Chinese Fen River Basin

In this paper, the author put forward some views and suggestions on water resources utilization and management and the ecological environment protection process in the future, through a new historical perspective of Fen River basin water resources development and the governmental efforts to solve the ecological troubles it caused. Fen River is the largest river in Shanxi Province and number two of Yellow River’s first-grade tributaries. Along with the development of the social economy and changes in the natural climate environment, Fen River basin appeared to have serious ecological environment problems, an increasingly serious shortage of water resources and pollution trouble which brought about the bottleneck of ecological and economic development in Shanxi Province, and affected the water quality and flow of Yellow River. Since the founding of new China, there have been four massive, systemic governances of Fen River focusing on surface water development, utilization of groundwater, flood control for security, and recovery of clean water flow, respectively. All have made some significant achievements; however, the governances have not been able to fundamentally solve the problems of the ecological environment under the limitation of temporal governing ideas and capital. During the twelfth five-year projects Shanxi Province launched, the “two longitudinal and cross ten” large water program, which aims at facing and solving the trouble of uneven spatial and temporal distribution and guaranteeing the entire province’s economic development demand of water resources by connecting the six major rivers and their large and medium-sized reservoirs in the province, taking the north trunk stream of Yellow River and Fen River as the two longitudinal trunks. The ecological restoration planning outline (2015–2030) that Shanxi Province issued in July 2015 sounded the horn of large-scale administering in Fen River basin for the fifth time. This new round of river basin ecological management must include: ecology—resources—environment—society—economy, the five elements which should be balanced considerations, none of which are dispensable; from divided ruling to shared governance within basin, from passive decontamination to active anti-fouling, from focusing on engineering construction at master stream to balance controlling of whole basin, all relevant departments and personnel need to create new ideas and actions.