Riverside living in danger of becoming a foul-smelling hell

Bi Shoucui doesn't think highly of living near Suzhou Creek, which winds through nine of Shanghai's 18 districts.

'In the 1970s, this was one of the ports on Suzhou Creek laden with faeces. Every morning workers dumped and traded faeces less than 10 metres from my home,' said Bi, a 58-year-old native of Anhui, who married a Shanghai native. 'The river was as black as ink, and the stench was so bad one year that we didn't dare open our windows at all.'

She thinks the currently fairly turbid water, contained by a concrete floodwall, is big progress because 'at least it doesn't smell'.

Across the 40-metre-wide creek from Bi's home, however, is another picture: tall, gleaming apartment buildings and their beautiful gardens. Home to residents willing to pay a premium for the waterfront scenery.

It's an odd juxtaposition, and it's not unique to Suzhou Creek. Almost all cities' rivers and lakes have been polluted as the result of the country's explosive economic development. And although many cities have spent billions of yuan in the past 15 years in a bid to clean their waterways, a single crystal-clear river or lake in a mainland city is hard to find.

Some cities' water is still dirty and foul-smelling, such as Dianchi Lake in Kunming, Yunnan, condemned by experts even after cleaning campaigns. Other cities, especially those in northern areas short of water, have clear rivers to some extent, but it's achieved by sluicing the section which flows in the city and isolating that part from the river upstream and downstream.

Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, calls them 'bonsai rivers'.