Chinese Ski Industry to Tackle Drought

Snowboarding down a mountain at one of China's many ski resorts. The ski industry here is growing fast.

Paul Bojarski works for MAS, an international ski developer, which is currently active in China.

"There is a lot of potential for development. Today we're working on six new ski resorts in China and they're the same size as the big ones in Europe."

But in order to grow China's ski industry needs to tackle the drought that much of the country is suffering. Christoph Muller is a ski instructor from Switzerland. He runs a tourist agency in Beijing.

"Northern China is extremely dry as we could see again this winter. Even Heilongjiang and Jilin there is not that much snowfall, maybe annually half a meter maximum. And that's just not enough to keep the slopes with natural snow."

The lack of snow means most resorts in China need to make their own. This requires water, an increasingly scarce commodity. But Paul Bojarski from ski developer MAS says this is not such a big problem.

"The quantity of water that we consume every winter is very, very small."

"When the snow melts the water goes back to the river or underground. And there's no fertilizer, no insect killer like the farmers are using. So the water is as pure at the end of the winter at springtime when the snow melts as before."

If the Chinese ski industry is able to survive the drought, some believe it has world class potential. Wang Lei is one of China's few professional snowboarders.

"We have big mountains. Around Xinjiang we have 7,000 mountains, and around Tibet we have so many mountains, good snow. But the places are really hard to get to. There are no people living there, no roads. The basic condition is not that good but if we invest enough with enough support maybe we can build roads, build an airport, build everything, I think we'll have the best ski resorts in the world."

Back on the slope skiers enjoy one of the final days of the season. If the industry is able to overcome potential water shortages, some believe it has a very bright future.

For CRI, I'm Dominic Swire.