muddy the waters [Parting,the,waters]

　　The Yarlung Tsampo River has hurtled down from the Himalayas for millennia, cleaving the mountain range in two and creating one of the world’s steepest and longest canyons. The river forms a huge bend in the remote southeastern corner of the Tibet before flowing into India and Bangladesh and on to the Bay of Bengal.
　　The Yarlung Tsampo is by far the largest river to cross China’s borders. It is also one of the world’s most promising sources of hydropower. A 510-megawatt hydropower station is already under construction on the river, and Beijing has studied the feasibility of building a dam at the river’s bend to generate 40,000 megawatts of electricity each year, twice that of the giant Three Gorges Dam.
　　In India, these projects are inciting anger and worry. Some in New Delhi claim Beijing is also planning to divert water from the river, which India calls the Brahmaputra, through the Himalayas and on to China’s parched north. Chinese officials have denied any such intention: They say such a diversion would cause too much damage to the environment and bilateral relations. Yet Indian suspicions that China will mismanage this wealth of water continue to mount.
　　A shaky foundation
　　The water resources of the Tibetan plateau seem likely to give rise to more international conflicts in the decades to come. Sometimes called “the third pole” because of its massive glacial ice deposits, the plateau is the source of five major international rivers – the Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Arun and Irtysh-Illy – as well as China’s Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl rivers. Altogether, they support nearly onethird of the world’s population.
　　Asia’s bright economic prospects are often taken for granted. Yet rapid economic and population growth is sucking dry the continent’s already-scarce water resources. Asia has three-fifths of the world’s population but just one-third of its water resources.
　　This shortage threatens to derail Asia’s future, either by constraining economic growth or destabilizing its decades-long peace, argues Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at India’s Centre for Policy Research and the author of“Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
　　China is at the center of Asia’s water debate, both because it controls much of the continent’s glacial water resources in the Tibetan plateau and because it is also experiencing a worrying water shortage.
　　China’s per capita water availability is only about one-quarter of the world’s average, and what resources it has are distributed unevenly. Northern China supports about half of the country’s population and most of its agriculture, yet it has only about 20% of its water, said Ma Jun, director of China’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.