DgcityChina has completed its first major overhaul of water legislation in a quarter century. Lawmakers passed a revised Water Law on Friday that reorganizes the country’s approach to scarcity, river health and flood control, with implementation set for March 22, 2027, World Water Day.
The statute runs to nine chapters and 102 articles, covering water resources planning, protection, development, conservation, a new chapter on the management of rivers and lakes, the construction and operation of water projects, dispute handling, supervision and legal liability. It enshrines conservation first, a more balanced geographic distribution of water and a systemic approach that pairs government planning with market mechanisms.
The new chapter on rivers and lakes is the biggest structural change. It establishes regular surveys of rivers and lakes and brings them under list-based management, a technique Chinese regulators have used to force local officials to take explicit responsibility for named water bodies. The goal is what the legislation calls the healthy recovery of rivers and lakes, pushing past the older emphasis on dams, diversions and supply expansion toward ecological flows, wetland protection and pollution control.
The numbers explain the urgency. China’s total water resources reached 2.72 trillion cubic meters in 2025, but supply is unevenly spread: the populous and industrial north holds a small fraction while the Tibetan plateau and southwest hold much of the surplus. Water use per 10,000 yuan of GDP fell 4.5 percent last year, and per 10,000 yuan of industrial value added it dropped 7.2 percent, steady gains that policymakers want to lock in as manufacturing, data centers and irrigated farming compete for supply.
The original law dated to 1988, with a major rewrite in 2002 and limited amendments in 2009 and 2016. Officials involved in the revision say the old framework, drafted when China was building its way out of shortage, did not give conservation, groundwater depletion and ecosystem restoration enough weight. Megaprojects such as the South-to-North Water Diversion have also created new questions about allocation, pricing and cross-province coordination that the revised text tries to answer.
For cities, farmers and companies, the practical impact will come through quotas, pricing and stricter permitting. Water-intensive projects in dry regions face tighter scrutiny, and provincial governments will need to bring local rules into line before the March 2027 start. Floods and droughts in the past two years have already made plain that water security is treated at the top of Chinese planning as an issue of economic stability and political risk, not merely engineering.
