Abstract

Since the human society came into being, river had taken the double functions of serving for human development and natural eco-environmental, and been affected by them at the same time. River’s natural characteristics will be influenced or harmed to a certain extent if its social attributes being embodied fully in order to make it supply us with more socioeconomic values; but if we simply consider maintaining river’s natural characteristics, its function in supporting socioeconomic development can not be put into practice, which violates river’s utilization principle of ‘human centered’. Thereby, the relationship between them is contradictory as well as unitive. As one of the famous sediment-laden rivers in the world, the healthy life features of the Yellow River have been threatened seriously, which mainly been described as the suspended river and ‘secondary suspended river’ becoming more and more severe, river base flow of the middle and lower reaches in non-flood season getting smaller, and deterioration of water quality still having no improvement. All these phenomena are cause by the disunity between the lower Yellow River’s unique natural characteristics and social attributes in great degree. In this paper, by analyzing the lower Yellow River’s unique natural characteristics and social attributes and by studying the correlation between them, we seek after thoughts and measures to solve present problems, and suggest that measures should be adapted to this unity relation when the medium & long term lower Yellow River comprehensive harnessing programming is laid out. For the short term goal, the Yellow River’s social attributes should be considered in priority, the present channel into the sea must be stabilized in order to exploit petroleum resources and support socioeconomic development in the lower Yellow River. The medium term goal should approach to its natural characteristics gradually when the utilization rate of water resources been further improved and petroleum resources in estuary been fully exploited. The long term goal would focused on its natural characteristics, so long as the national economy is very powerful, we can let the channel of the lower Yellow River shift its course periodically on a scheduled basis in order to adapt to its ‘shiftable’ natural characteristics, and its sustainable health and development can be maintained in the end.

Keywords: The Lower Yellow River, River, Natural Characteristics, Social Attributes