China is home to 1.4 billion or about 22% of the world’s population. Yet the country has only about 7% of the world’s arable land and entire regions in the north suffer from worse water scarcity than that of the Middle East. China is no stranger to massive engineering feats – the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, for example, was first mooted as early as 1952 to channel water from the Yangtze River in southern China to the more arid and industralizied north.