According to Huanqiu, relaying a Xinhua report, Xi issued an important instruction on improving work to protect and govern the Yellow River. The same day, a national conference on comprehensively advancing Yellow River protection and governance was held in Zhengzhou to pass the instruction to central departments and provincial officials. The exact date the instruction was written was not stated in the reports we could confirm.

The instruction first assessed the past 80 years. Under the Communist Party’s leadership, it said, the historical cycle of levee breaches and shifting channels was fundamentally ended and long-term stability achieved. Huanqiu quoted Xi as saying this showed the advantages of the socialist system.

For the new journey, the instruction set the principle of ‘focus on protection, key on governance’ and cited an approach of water conservation first, spatial balance, systematic governance and the combined action of government and market. The aims are to improve the ‘grand protection, grand coordination’ framework, reinforce the national ecological security barrier, keep the river safe over the long term and preserve Yellow River culture.

Tasks conveyed at the meeting

Executive Vice Premier and Politburo member Liu Guozhong attended and spoke. He called the instruction highly political and guiding and urged study and implementation, listing shared protection responsibility across the basin, long-term river safety, water conservation and intensive use, and a stronger ability to allocate water through the network. Water ecology protection and the inheritance of Yellow River culture were also included.

Officials from Qinghai, Gansu, Henan and Shandong, as well as representatives of the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Water Resources, also spoke and reportedly outlined 80 years of governance. Investment totals and project lists were not given in the reports we confirmed.

The wording is familiar. Huanqiu has repeatedly recalled Xi’s September 2024 remarks at a Lanzhou symposium urging continued improvement of the ecological ‘grand protection, grand coordination’ pattern of the basin. In Chinese official accounts, the framework of protection upstream, governance midstream and restoration downstream extends from that.

Reading the basin-management challenge

The Yellow River supplies major northern cities and farmland, so water saving and allocation are long-standing issues. Chinese authorities say they will address them under the principle of water conservation first. In international river management, such basin-level approaches are often treated as part of climate adaptation. Which concrete policies and budgets will follow has not been confirmed.