China bets on manufactured water, and wants to sell it to the world

China is emerging as a major supplier of water technology to parched countries across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, as shrinking natural supplies at home push Beijing to invest heavily in manufactured freshwater, industry experts say. Chinese firms are selling desalination membranes, filtration equipment and engineering services to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, often through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which connects Chinese capital and infrastructure projects to developing markets. Even Gulf states, long desalination pioneers, are turning to Chinese manufacturers to produce equipment at scale. China exported more than $2 billion of water filtering and purifying machinery in 2025, up 25 per cent from $1. 6bn in 2020, according to UN Comtrade .

Vontron Technology said it shipped more than 30,000 seawater desalination membranes to BRI countries last year, enough for more than 300,000 tons of daily capacity. In January, PowerChina said it was building a water supply project in Tanzania to serve more than 450,000 people. At home, Beijing has made water security a strategic priority. Spending on water conservancy has grown faster than military spending since 2015, according to China Water Risk (CWR), a Hong Kong-based think tank. It now exceeds 1. 2 trillion yuan ($170bn) a year, which CWR says rivals China’s central military budget. A crisis at home The push is rooted in domestic risk. In August, a massive collapse of ice and rock near the border between Nepal and Tibet showed how volatile natural water sources are becoming. Tibet’s “water towers” feed headwaters for nearly 2bn people across South, Southeast and East Asia, and climate change is eroding them. Meanwhile, severe over-extraction in northern China has depleted groundwater and left key farming…