Three years ago, after an algal bloom in nearby Tai Lake forced the affluent city of Wuxi, Jiangsu province, to cut water supplies to its two million residents, the humiliated city and provincial governments vowed to clean up the lake.
It hasn't worked.
What is worse, the country's third-largest fresh water lake has been abandoned by most cities in the area as the chief source of drinking water.
'It's such a tragedy that nearly all the [nearby] cities have given up Tai as a water source and people living by the lake have to find water elsewhere,' said environmental whistle-blower Wu Lihong , who was jailed for three years for his activism. The sheer difficulty of cleaning up the accumulated contamination of the lake, and the mutual finger pointing by the three major jurisdictions involved - Jiangsu, Zhejiang province and Shanghai - accounted for Tai Lake being nearly deserted, said Wu, whose decade-long crusade has earned him the unofficial title of 'Tai Lake Warrior'.
In some parts of the lake, the pollution is even worse than what sparked the water crisis in 2007. A Ministry of Environmental Protection report released on Monday said Tai is so seriously contaminated that sixty algal outbreaks were found in 91 tests from April to June this year.
A fisherman in Zhoutie, a town on the northwestern shore of the lake in Yixing , said he dared not open his windows at home, about 100 metres from the lake, because the stench from the algae was so strong.