bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

sponsorType

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

Jasper Becker

For 60 years, Bengbu's Soya Sauce Factory in Anhui province poured 100 tonnes of black, stinking waste water into the Huai River every day.

Three years ago it became one of the 6,500 factories along China's third largest river that were shut down during the country's biggest environmental clean-up.

Inspector Sun Yun of the city's Environmental Protection Bureau now comes two or three times a week to inspect the factory. 'A lot of small companies like this one have tried to reopen,' he said. 'It is difficult to stop them but if we catch them we fine them.'

About 150 million people live along the Huai River and its tributaries. Many of them have prospered through rural factories producing paper, leather, chemical fertilisers and other products.

Large state factories were given money to install water treatment equipment, but went bankrupt and shut down.

'We spent three million yuan [HK$2.8 million] on a water-treatment plant so we could reopen,' said factory manager Wu Dingan, showing visitors the tanks containing filters through which dark liquid bubbled.

The waters of the Huai River may be cleaner than they were, but no one, especially experts like Mr Sun, dare to eat the few fish that survive in it. 'Only the fish bred in tanks using underground water taste good,' he said.

In Anhui's capital, Hefei, environmental experts claim the campaign was a grand success.

'We have basically solved the problem,' said Cheng Wenming, director of the Anhui Chao Lake and Huai River environmental protection bureau.

Other provinces like Henan have not done such a good job.

After disastrous floods in 1950, Mao Zedong created the Huai River Basin Commission with the slogan 'Let the mountains bend their tops, let the rivers give way'.

As a latter-day Pharaoh, Mao commanded tens of millions to labour night and day on a vast complex of dams, water channels, canals, dykes and reservoirs turning the commission into one of the most powerful state bodies.

The stupendous engineering feat, involving the construction of 36 huge dams, 159 middling dams and four thousand locks, helped manage floods that for centuries had brought ruin to farmers on the fertile plains of Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Jiangsu.

The Huai River has presented unique problems since the 12th century when the Yellow River changed its course and blocked the Huai He's route to the sea. During the summer flood season, the waters had nowhere to go but to spread across the plain.

Now, much of it empties south into the Yangtze River. But to relieve the pressure during peak seasons, the Communists built several channels to take the water directly to the sea. In 1998, the Huai River Commission even began excavating a third channel, 163km long, at a cost of 400 million yuan.

It remains a political taboo to openly criticise this vast endeavour, one of the glories of Maoist China, yet the shortcomings of this thinking have become increasingly apparent. For two decades, the Communist Party kept secret the collapse of two giant storage dams in the mountains of Henan. When the Shimantan and Banqiao reservoirs collapsed during heavy rains in August 1975, 240,000 people died, the worst dam disaster in history.

Environmental mismanagement may be the cause of declining rainfall in the region. During one recent drought year, a major section of the Huai River ran dry for a record 247 days.

High concentrations of pollutants built up in the water penned in behind the dams and barrages. During massive floods seen in 1991 and then again in 1994, the polluted water was washed out, poisoning the drinking water of many cities like Bengbu.

For hundreds of kilometres along the Ying River, a major tributary of the Huai, the water turned black or yellow.

Over two weeks, more than a million people had no fresh water to drink. About 30,000 fell sick with stomach poisoning and skin rashes, and fisheries were destroyed.

Although officials are reluctant to admit detailed knowledge, a recent Chinese newspaper report said one stretch along the main river has death rates a third above the average and cancer rates twice the provincial average.

In areas like Xuxian county, Anhui, very high rates of cancer deaths are reported from untreated discharges of chemicals such as chromium.

Before the campaign, the amount of waste water entering the river annually was reported to be 3.68 billion cubic metres of industrial and municipal effluent. Along the Ying River 300 factories poured out 1,300 tonnes a day, while urban waste water amounted to 455,000 tonnes.

In the mid-1990s, the clean-up bill for the whole Huai River system was put at 1,000 billion yuan. Chief engineer Wang Yutai of the Huai He Basin Commission now thinks this is an underestimate.

'It will cost more,' he said. All across the region, 52 urban waste-water treatment plants are under construction in a frantic effort to make up for decades of neglect.

One prime example is Hefei. Although it has water delivered from mountain reservoirs at great cost, all waste water is discharged untreated directly into Chao Hu, one of the country's largest and most polluted lakes. Its water is undrinkable.

'China has devoted great resources for managing the Huai River but little to conserving its water,' says Professor Zheng Yisheng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

He recently helped publish a paper that calculates the cost of environmental damage.

The authors believe it equalled more than three per cent of GDP growth recorded in the 1990s, or 108.51 billion yuan. Water pollution alone cost 32.62 billion yuan, of which health costs were 16.5 billion yuan.

The cost of the clean-up is expected to be borne largely by the local factories themselves and the medical care by the victims of the pollution. The state itself continues to pour money into the refurbishment of the often primitively built dams erected in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them constructed with just mud and stone. 'The dams built during the Great Leap Forward, especially those in Shandong, are substandard,' said chief engineer Mr Wang.

The Shimantan and Banqiao dams were redesigned and built in the early 1990s along with 11 other major dams. Eight others are scheduled to be repaired at a combined price tag of one billion yuan. One dam to be built in the Henan mountains will involve relocation of 780,000 people.

According to Professor Zheng Yisheng, China's inability to control such rampant pollution highlights basic problems in China's political system.

'Rivers flow through one province then another but all only consider their own interests first and ignore those of others,' Professor Zheng said. 'Local governments do not want to close down polluting factories because they would lose taxes revenues, so they protect their own interests and sacrifice the environment.'

Graphic: HUAIHEGFN



River gives way - to pollution