The 16th World Water Day and 21st Chinese Water Week were initiated on 22 March 2008. The theme for World Water Day 2008 is "Sanitation Matters." The theme of the Chinese Water Week is “Developing Water for Improving People's Livelihood”.

The World Water Day since it was initiated by the United Nations in 1992 is to promote awareness of increasingly serious water problems and press for action by governments worldwide to save and protect water resources.

Minister Chen Lei published an article on the People's Daily to commemorate the 16th World Water Day and 21st Chinese Water Week. He wrote that water is closely related to the people's livelihood; flood relief is related to the safety of people's life; drinking water is related to people's health, thus water development is vital for the improvement of people's livelihood.

The Chinese Government has been attached great importance to water development. A series of measures have been taken for flood control and drought relief, safe drinking water supply, reservoir reinforcement, resettlement arrangement and later stage assistant, control of major rivers and lakes, irrigation and drainage and rural water supply.

Joint efforts haven been made by both the central and local governments on effectively coupling with extreme weather conditions for reducing losses caused by water disaster as much as possible. Priority has been given to safe drinking water supply to rural areas and the difficulty with nearly 100 million rural residents to access to drinking water has been overcome.

However, there are still more than 200 million rural residents do not have safe drinking water in China. The theme of “Developing Water for Improving People's Livelihood” highlights the focus of water development in the future, that is to secure people' life, improve people's living condition, and restoring ecology. In order to realize these objectives, great attention needs to paid on water issues that people mostly concerns and let the people share the fruit of water development.

(Ministry of Water Resources March 24, 2008)