BEIJING, Jul 1 (IPS) - Few in the Chinese capital are aware of the price their city would pay for staging the world’s first ‘green Olympics’ in August. The fabulous capital of Chinese emperors and the epitome of modern China’s ambitions is being driven to extinction by its chronic lack of water. And the Olympic games are expediting the city’s slow demise, according to experts.

'Within a generation this city would cease to exist,' says Dai Qing, China’s best-known environmentalist. 'We won’t have the ancient capital any longer and the ugly modern Beijing would disappear too. Unfortunately, government officials and Beijing residents are equally unaware of how serious the water crisis is.'

When the Olympic games open on Aug. 8, visitors will marvel at musical fountains and huge water landscapes throughout the capital. Spectators will enjoy rowing competitions on the dried out Chaobai river -- which has been brought back to life by diverting water through a 13 kilometre-long underground pipe from another Beijing river.

This water exuberance in a city constantly battered by sand storms in China’s arid northern plain and would be made possible thanks to large engineering schemes transferring water from the capital’s neighbouring provinces and through Beijing’s ever deeper extraction of underground water.

In preparations for the Olympic Games Beijing authorities are developing man-made lakes and adding around 200 million cubic metres of water -- or about 5 percent -- to normal use of water this year. Neighbouring provinces, which have been called upon to share the capital’s burden of hosting the Olympics are crying foul. In Hebei province the dictum to provide Beijing with clean water has deprived farmers of water for irrigation and nipped hundreds of industrial projects in the bud.