Abstract
At first glance, shared basins should rank high on China’s agenda. Just over one-third of the country’s land area, 3,200,000 km2, lies in 19 international river basins (Gleick 2000: 249).1 Only Russia (8 million km2), the US (6 million km2) and Brazil (5 million km2) have a greater basin area. With the notable exception of its long and arid interface with Mongolia, China shares a river basin along most of its 22,000 km land border with 14 countries and two special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau) (Fig. 9.1).
In the Northeast, these are the Heilong (Amur), Yalu, Suifun and Tumen; in the Northwest, the Aral Sea, Har Us Nur, Ili, Irtysh (Ob), Pu Lun To, and Tarim; in the Southwest, the Beilun, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Megna, Indus, Irrawady, Lancang (Mekong), Nu (Salween), Pearl (Xi and Bei), and Yuan (Red) (He et al. 1999, which provides the regionalization; Gleick 2000:249).
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Nickum, J.E. (2008). The Upstream Superpower: China’s International Rivers. In: Varis, O., Biswas, A.K., Tortajada, C. (eds) Management of Transboundary Rivers and Lakes. Water Resources Development and Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74928-8_9
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