China Tackles Cleanup of Foul Huai River

Yang Kewu peered down the bank of the muddy Huai River and pronounced himself pleased: “It’s pretty clear.”

The source of his satisfaction was two inches of clear water atop the Huai’s pale brown murkiness--a sign that the water, although not drinkable, is only health-threatening. It has in the past been black and lethal, said Yang, the environmental protection chief for this eastern city.

On China’s most polluted river, any improvement is progress no matter how slight.

The Huai is so foul, officials say, that as much as four-fifths of the river and its nearly 200 tributaries are undrinkable. In half of those branches, the water is not fit for humans, plants or even machinery. Cancer rates are rising, crops have withered and factories have closed.

Pollution in the Huai River basin and in other regions threatens to undermine the fragile prosperity China has built over the last 16 years--a success based largely on small, wasteful factories set cheek-by-jowl with farms.

Environmental protection officials from Beijing to provincial mill towns like Bengbu have begun trying to blunt pollution’s impact. For the nation’s first river cleanup, they chose the Huai (pronounced huh-why).

In August, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, decreed that the river in east-central China be restored to drinkable quality by the end of 2000. Factories in the Huai basin must meet pollution-discharge standards by 1997.

Although much of the $1.2-billion cleanup is still being planned, officials in the four provinces straddling the basin began closing down the worst polluters last year to force them to clean up.

“If they don’t meet the standards for waste water by the end of 1997, we will shut them down in 1998. That’s the national regulation,” said Xu Jiasheng, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Bureau in Anhui province.

Money, bureaucratic infighting and political concerns will likely slow the cleanup but not stop it, a foreign consultant to the project said.

“They’re very smart people, very energetic, and they’re trying to develop a plan to get the major lumps out by 2000,” said Gerald Hansler, executive director of the Delaware River Basin Commission, which cleaned up and now regulates the Delaware.

“They won’t do it all, but they’ll get a good start,” he said.

Even in the best of times, margins of survival are thin for the 110 million people living in the 108,000-square-mile basin, the most densely populated of China’s seven major river systems.

Farm plots are small, often about a sixth of an acre, and with little rainfall outside summer, water is precious.

Still, the plains and shallow valleys astride the 600-mile-long Huai and its tributaries yield about a fifth of China’s grain harvest every year.

But in the last decade, hundreds of paper mills, distilleries, tanneries and other factories have been set up, padding peasants’ pockets.

Those new sources of income, and a lack of sewage treatment plants in all but three of the basin’s 43 cities, are poisoning the land and constraining the lives of its inhabitants.

“Thousands of residents along the riverside have drinking-water problems,” Zang Yuxiang, deputy director of the National Environmental Protection Agency, said at a seminar in Beijing last June.

“In some areas, the rates of cancers--intestinal and stomach--have increased. Water pollution has resulted in the deaths of people and animals.

“Crops in fields irrigated by river water have pollutants higher than the standards. In quite a few areas, crop yields have decreased or there was no yield at all,” Zang said.

Along a coal-dark tributary of the Huai, a barge captain who identified himself only by his surname, Wu, said fish are harder to come by.

“We can’t drink the river water,” said Wu, who lives on his boat with his wife and two children. “Ten years ago we could. Now we get it from a tap in town.”

Zhang Pengju, mayor of Fuyang, a booming city on a Huai tributary called the Ying, worries about pollution’s effects on growth.

“The environmental equipment on township enterprises is poor. Our heaviest polluter, a paper factory, has been shut down for refitting of environmental equipment,” he said. “Housing complexes have concrete waste tanks in the ground, but there’s no sewage treatment plant.”

Zhang estimates pollution has cost industries and farmers the equivalent of $80 million in the last few years.

The Huai’s condition is dire but not exceptional. In 1994, the last year for which statistics are available, China’s major rivers were on average about half as polluted as the Huai and growing worse.

Some, like the northeastern Songhua and Liao rivers, whose banks are home to huge state-run industries, are as bad as the Huai.

Water supplies for major cities are also at risk. Legislators in Guangzhou and Shanghai have warned of drinking-water shortages if the dumping of untreated sewage and chemicals is not stopped.

More than 1,600 chemical and sewage spills were recorded in 1994, government statistics say.

In July 1994, for instance, sluice gates holding back waste laced with ammonia, nitrogen, phenols and potassium permanganate accidentally opened, choking the Huai and leaving hundreds of thousands of residents in Bengbu and four other cities without drinking water.

Dozens of fish farms were wiped out and factories had to shut down. Over the month it took to dissipate, the slick killed 26 million pounds of fish.

The spill enraged the public, caused $75 million in economic losses and drew Beijing’s attention to the Huai.

In the aftermath, the government set up a task force of 10 national ministries, two regional commissions and the four provincial governments to oversee a cleanup.

The task force decided in September to shut down all small paper mills this year and reduce river pollution by 15%.

In Bengbu, a city of 600,000 in northeastern Anhui, Yang, the environmental official, has targeted 90 factories and plans to build two sewage-treatment plants.

He has helped the Bengbu Distillery, a major polluter, reduce waste by switching to sorghum from sweet potatoes and importing technology.

But dealing with the city’s chemical dye factory has been more awkward, Yang said.

He can fine plants as much as $6,000 and force partial shutdowns, but he cannot get them all loans for expensive anti-pollution equipment.

“We can’t close down factories and send the workers home, because that would affect social stability,” Yang said, echoing the fears that China’s leaders have of large-scale layoffs.

Concerns about public unrest also keep local officials from increasing water fees to raise money for sewage-treatment plants.

But Yang believes Beijing is committed to the Huai cleanup because it needs to apply the experience elsewhere.

“We can’t let the Huai River become a black ditch,” Yang said.