Opinion | Guangzhou canal clean-up efforts fail to meet the standards
Guangzhou's Donghaochong is shown off to leaders as poster project of green push, but in reality water quality is no better than before
In his first trip as the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping headed south in December and visited a section of the Donghaochong canal in downtown Guangzhou.
An expensive showpiece of Guangzhou's green initiatives, the canal was "cleaned up" in 2010 as part of a massive urban renewal project, turning a heavily polluted area into a neighbourhood park at a cost of more than one billion yuan (HK$1.25 billion). It has since been visited by other leaders such as former president Hu Jintao and former premier Wen Jiabao .
However, official tests by the Guangzhou Environmental Protection Bureau that were released to the public for the first time last month show the water quality of Donghaochong rated "worse than Grade 5", meaning the pollution was beyond the limits of the five-level scale. The canal now stands as an embarrassing epitome of the failed ambitions of Guangzhou authorities to clean up the city's waterways, despite massive spending.
In early 2009, city officials embarked on a series of projects worth 48 billion yuan. They were intended to "fundamentally improve the city's water environment" by June 2010, five months ahead of the Asian Games held there.
But among all of the 31 canals running through downtown Guangzhou, only one is now flowing with water that barely reaches grade five standards, according to the latest official findings.
And those findings have prompted bitter questions posed by local newspapers, asking whether the cash splashed on 581 clean-up projects was a total waste.