One Screen, Some Drones and the People Who Watch the Water

At Taocha, in Jiuchong town of Xichuan county, the Dan River’s water leaves the Danjiangkou reservoir and turns north into the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The city’s own account of the place opens with the geography rather than the statistics: the water surges out and runs north, and what it feeds stretches as far as Beijing, Tianjin and the Hebei plain. On 13 May 2021 the state’s top leader came here, watched the intake gates operate, then went out on the reservoir and took a sample of the water at the point of abstraction. The instruction he gave was about the politics of protection — from the height of safeguarding the life line, to secure the safety of the works, of supply and of quality.

The system behind the structure is recent. On 6 January 2026 Xichuan county inaugurated a water protection centre at sub-departmental level, and its monitoring and dispatch hall carries an electronic screen 2.72 metres high and 12.8 metres wide, on which the intelligence platform, the command platform and the joint enforcement platform are unified into one picture of reservoir conditions and water quality. Around the shore, a camera network that had already merged the systems of several departments added sixty-one high-definition cameras and thirty-four broadcast units in March 2026, watching day and night. The images are read by algorithms that can pick out illegal angling, illegal fishing and swimming, and raise the alarm; four drones and unmanned boats complete the “sky, ground and water” system the county describes.

The people are what a visitor sees. Zhao Jianfeng, a cleaner, rows slowly across the reservoir gathering bottles, branches and refuse, day after day, and says the water being clean settles his own mind. Zhang Yuancheng was moved from the reservoir area for the works; he stayed on as a volunteer, carrying binoculars up the hills to check the trees, saying that although he has moved away the water source will always be his roots, and that the forest was planted by his own hands. Around them the county runs twenty-four-hour water quality monitoring, a separate treatment plan for each outlet, twelve sewage treatment plants and 175 village-level facilities, and more than eight thousand water guards. The figures moved accordingly: a June 2025 report cites over 71 billion cubic metres delivered to 114 million people; an April 2026 report cites over 77.6 billion and 118 million.