Free Republic

Large chemical plants, backbone of the country’s industrial development, are built in China’s rural areas, close to small villages, where each year deaths due to cancer increase. The government denounces the rise in cases linked to industrial waste but refuses to close down the plants or move the villages. (DAQING) – Since the mid-1990s, a strong ammonia odour has permeated homes in Daqing village, Heilongjiang province, north eastern China and has not abandoned it since.  It comes from a petrol-chemical plant built on the outskirts of the village, which has caused the death of many villagers since its inauguration.  This...

(LESHAN, China) -- A few years back, the Leshan Giant Buddha started to weep. Or so some locals imagined when black streaks appeared on the rose-colored cheeks of the towering 7th-century figure, hewn from sandstone cliffs in the forests of southern China. They worried they had angered the religious icon. The culprit, it turned out, was the region's growing number of coal-fired power plants. Their smokestacks spew toxic gases into the air, which return to earth as acid rain. Over time, the Buddha's nose turned black and curls of hair began to fall from its head. "If this continues, the...

(HONG KONG) — Batman might cut a superhuman figure as he fights off evil-doers to save the world, but Hong Kong's polluted harbour is, apparently, one death-defying stunt too far. Producers shooting the next Batman movie have been forced to cut one scene involving the caped crusader -- played by Christian Bale -- jumping out of a plane into the city's famed Victoria Harbour. According to the South China Morning Post, producers felt the poor water quality was just too dangerous for the action hero when shooting for part of the film takes place here in the coming week. Citing...

Summary: China's environmental woes are mounting, and the country is fast becoming one of the leading polluters in the world. The situation continues to deteriorate because even when Beijing sets ambitious targets to protect the environment, local officials generally ignore them, preferring to concentrate on further advancing economic growth. Really improving the environment in China will require revolutionary bottom-up political and economic reforms. China's environmental problems are mounting. Water pollution and water scarcity are burdening the economy, rising levels of air pollution are endangering the health of millions of Chinese, and much of the country's land is rapidly turning into...

(VICTORIA) - Harmful pesticides, pollutants and other chemicals from Asia may be landing on Vancouver Island as they float to the Arctic, says a professor at Royal Roads University. Matt Dodd, head of the school's environmental science program, wants to install 20 specialized air-pollutant monitoring stations to see what levels of persistent organic pollutants and PCBs - polychlorinated biphenyls - register on the southern Island. "We've done work in the Arctic and done work in China at the source, and now we are trying to find out if [pollution] stops in-between," said Dodd. Dodd proposes to build the pollution catchers...

(BEIJING) - Chinese joint ventures with global corporations such as Pepsi-Cola, Samsung, 3M and GM are among 100 multinational companies on an updated blacklist of water polluters, according to a non-governmental organization. The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs has compiled a list of water polluters based on government data since 2004 and publishes it at www.ipe.org.cn. The 2006 report listed 33 offenders. Appearing on the latest list are foreign brands well known to Chinese consumers, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Kao. It also reveals pollution caused by some global chemical giants, such as DuPont, Degussa and...

Beijing's overall air quality improved during the four-day test period ahead of next August's Olympic Games in which more than a million cars each day were barred from the roads, according to the Beijing Environment Protection Monitoring Center. A police officer stops a car with an even-numbered license plate on a main thoroughfare in Beijing during the first of a four-day air quality experiment for the Olympics, August 17, 2007. [Xinhua]  The test resulted in the removal of cars from roads in downtown Beijing and the air quality was classified as "fairly good" for the duration of the four days. "The index of inhalable particular matter...

Prayers for strong winds look set to become a major component of Beijing's Olympic preparations after a traffic-reduction trial failed to shift the smog that hangs over the city. More than a million cars were taken off the roads for the four-day test period, but there was no improvement in the air quality, according to city officials. Yesterday the skies above Beijing were the same dirty grey shade as when the test started on Friday. As of Sunday the air quality ranking had not budged from level two on China's five-tier scale, in which level one represents clear unpolluted skies....

(Beijing) - It was the frugal minicar that lured the Liu family to the showroom, but it was the full-size sedan that hooked them. Like countless other first-time auto buyers in China, the Lius were moving up in the world, and getting four wheels with plenty of steel was a key part of that process. "A car! This means so much to us," said Liu Yang, while her husband, Liu Yue, fiddled with the dashboard of the Chery Eastar sedan that they were about to buy in a showroom in suburban north Beijing. The biggest car-buying boom in world history...

(HONG KONG) -- Just as growing numbers of newly affluent Chinese are planning to buy the status symbol they seek most, along comes a spoilsport government with a plan to limit the number of cars on the roads. Beijing today, Shanghai and other cities tomorrow? The central government is enforcing a test run this week of a plan to take more than 1 million cars off Beijing's roads. The object is to see how effective it will be in cleaning the capital's filthy air for China's "green" Olympics in August next year. It's a desperate measure in a country that...

(BEIJING) - Waste water dumped by factories into a river in southwest China has poisoned and killed about 40,000 kg (88,180 lb) of fish, media said on Tuesday. Eighty government officials went door to door in Chongan town, Guizhou province, to warn villagers not to eat, sell or transport the fish, state radio and news portal www.sina.com.cn reported. Dead fish were found floating on a 5-km (3-mile) stretch of the murky and foul-smelling river on August 10, the media said, adding it would take another four to five days to clear them away. Officials blamed the deaths on upstream factories...

(Beijing)--Facing deteriorating water quality, Hubei Province in central China has banned the booming pearl farming in all its lakes, rivers and reservoirs, the local government said. Pearl farms have covered a total area of 32,123 acres in the province, and the annual output has exceeded 400 tonnes, a government spokesman said on Saturday. Some farmers resorted to pesticides and manure to farm the pearl oysters, which has caused swathes of algae to bloom in the water, and turned the water stinky, he said. The government said it would not approve new applications to establish such pearl farms, and has ordered...

The world's most inclusive sporting event, the Olympics, is expected to take place in the Chinese capital of Beijing on August 8-24, 2008. On Wednesday night, dignitaries and sports fans from across China and the rest of the world gathered in front of the Chinese National Museum at Tiananmen Square in Beijing for a colorful ceremony to celebrate the one-year countdown to the games. Fireworks lit up the sky prompting all-night celebrations and merry-making. Beijing believes it is ready for the 2008 Olympics. It has already spent billions of dollars on new sports infrastructures, roads, subways, leisure venues, etc. But...

(BEIJING) - For millennia, China's great rivers have snaked their long, meandering courses across the country, providing the life-blood for Chinese civilization: water. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, 5,000 years of history and culture have unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in an otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity and dynamism in its wake. But the effects of severe pollution, large-scale damming and climate change are combining to spell catastrophe for the rivers, with deeply worrying implications for the millions of Chinese who continue to depend on them. Ten percent...

Standing on a soccer field before a match as the national anthem plays is always a breathtaking experience for Canadian goalkeeper Karina LeBlanc. But when LeBlanc, 27, and her national teammates were training in Beijing in April and May, it was the city's polluted air that had them choked up. "You get over there, it's different," LeBlanc said. "You find it a bit more difficult to breathe or you find it's almost like there's phlegm in your throat." While the team was in Beijing, the city's air quality was measured as high as 210, eight times worse than the air...

(BEIJING) - Nearly eight out of 10 Chinese coastal city sewers discharged excessive amounts of pollutants into the sea in the first six months of the year, state media said on Saturday. Most of the outlets were "improperly arranged", Xinhua news agency said, with 43 percent in tourist, sea farming and other reserved areas and 33 percent in harbour and shipping areas. Rapidly growing China is poised to overtake the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases, and Beijing faces rising international calls to accept mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions from factories and vehicles. Water pollution...

(BEIJING) - Chinese farmers besieged a brewery to protest against pollution and being left out in the economic cold -- common complaints in the China's restive countryside -- local people said on Sunday. Villagers in the southwest province Sichuan blocked the gate of the brewery and a nearby road close to Shifang city on Thursday and Friday demanding that officials and executives resolve their grievances, locals told Reuters by phone. "There's been a lot of trouble," said one villager who gave her family name as Huang. "They weren't listening and so we blocked the road." The villagers' complaints could not...

(HEFEI) -- Huaihe River, China's third longest, is seriously polluted due to excessive discharges of industrial and daily waste, according to a report from the Huaihe River Committee. An excessive influx of industrial waste from the provinces along the river is the major source of contamination, said Wang Bin, deputy director of the committee under the Ministry of Water Resources, quoting a report examining the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and other chemical contents in the river in 2006. The amount of COD, ammonia and nitrogen, the main indexes to determine the water quality, in the river has far exceeded the...

GUANGZHOU: Guangdong Province must do more to prevent pollution in the estuary area of the Pearl River, which runs into the South China Sea, officials said. Li Zhujiang, director of the Guangdong oceanic and fishery administration, said yesterday that the Pearl River estuary had been damaged by years of ineffective protection measures. "The water near the shore has been seriously polluted by industrial, agricultural and urban waste," Li said. According to a recent research report by Li's department, Guangdong discharged 2.35 billion tons of industrial waste-water into the sea last year, of which only about 84 percent met pollution-control standards....

Deep in the Guangdong province of China, I met a woman I won't soon forget. Wearing a straw hat and carrying a sickle, Zhu Chuuyun is a farmer, growing rice like many in her village...... She told me it all started when the water in her village turned red. First the red water claimed her crops, and then it stole away her husband. He died an awful death, suffering for more than a year before finally succumbing to cancer. The problem, as she described it to me, is that the Hengshui River, which provides the only water to her village,...

It is ironic for a highly polluted town to be repeatedly crowned with titles for its environmental "achievements." Dawang Town in Shandong Province is totally unworthy of its title as one of the most livable places in China and one of the most beautiful town in the country. Today the town is one of the most important industrial towns in Shandong Province. With many highly polluting factories but poor pollution control, it has become one of the most polluted towns in China, says People's Daily on July 18. In the last 10 years, the town has received more than 100...

BEIJING: China has stopped the public release of an official study adding up the cost of the nation's environmental damage, a government researcher told a Chinese newspaper, blaming official reluctance to confront pollution. The Beijing News reported Monday that the release of a "green GDP" report computing the cost of pollution and ecological degradation in 2005 had been "indefinitely postponed." Wang Jinnan, a senior expert at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning who was technical head of the project, said that publicly spelling out the cost of bad air, water and soil had drawn fierce opposition from local officials eager...

Many of the environmental disasters erupting in the country could have been avoided, or at least wouldn't have been so bad, if there was strong public environmental awareness. One example is the recent public protest against the PX chemical plant planned for Xiamen in East China's Fujian Province. The plan has to be changed under heavy pressure from local residents who fear possible health hazards of the giant chemical plant in the scenic city. Meanwhile, construction of the Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev also seems to have been stopped, at least for the moment, due to the strong protest of people living along...

Hong Kong could begin to feel the pinch of increased water demand in the mainland as early as five years from now, an academic has warned. Hong Kong University associate professor of geography Frederick Lee Yok-shiu said he estimates mainland authorities may decrease the supply to Hong Kong in favor of Pearl River Delta cities such as Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou within the next five to seven years. "Five, six, or seven years down the line, increasing competition may lead to a change in the way water (from Guangdong) is going to be distributed among the different cities," Lee told...

<p>Hundreds of millions of people fall ill every year or die prematurely from air and water pollution caused by China's breakneck economic growth, one of the world's leading economic thinktanks has concluded following an 18-month investigation.</p> <p>China's water quality causes the researchers great concern. One third of the length of all China's rivers are now "highly polluted" as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year.</p>

<p>It was only when pollution literally started to bloom across the lakes of China earlier this summer that the country's leaders finally sounded full alarm on the environment.</p> <p>Blue-green algae blooms choked Lake Taihu - China's third biggest source of freshwater - in May, forcing 5 million people to use bottled water for drinking and bathing.</p>

The Chinese government has been accused of attempting to cover up nearly three quarters of a million deaths caused by rampant pollution. Chinese officials reportedly tried to censor a World Bank document that found filthy air and water prematurely kill 750,000 people every year in China. One woman told Sky News that people in her village are paying for the pollution with their lives. Wei Dongying took us down the Qiantang River in a tiny fishing at night, as flashes of lightning lit up the huge expanse of water. An overpowering stench of chemicals and a thick slick of foam...

GUANGZHOU (Reuters) - Leaders of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou led thousands in a "swimathon" across the Pearl River on Sunday to trumpet its recent cleanup -- at a time of mounting water pollution crises across the country. Guangzhou Mayor Zhang Guangning fired a starter's gun before leading more than 3,500 people in a much hyped swim across the river, China's third longest, whose lower reaches had been seriously polluted by rapid industrialization. The swim, an annual event, was abandoned in the 1970s because of the chronic pollution and resurrected only last year. Years of promoting economic growth at...

BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) -- Climate change linked to the contraction of wetlands at the source of China's two longest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, has reduced the volume of water flowing in the rivers, said Chinese scientists. Scientists from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) studied changes over the past 40 years to the wetlands on the cold Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in west China where the two rivers have their source. Analyzing aerial photos and satellite remote sensing figures, they found that the wetlands on the plateau have shrunk more...

China has ordered hotels in the capital to keep rooms no cooler than 26 degrees in summer and no warmer than 20 degrees in the winter in a bid to save energy. Beijing Vice-Mayor Ding Xiangyang said the orders had to be obeyed, unlike previous schemes in which hotels were urged gently. Beijing's consumption of power is increasing every year, and its hotel industry is a major consumer of electricity. All hotels with Olympics contracts were urged to meet state standards for "green hotels" before the end of this year. "The standards require hotels to use water-saving equipment, install power-saving...

For the past two weeks residents living around China's second largest lake have been able to smell a rat—make that two billion rats. When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China's Hunan Province. The flooding began flushing out rat holes around the lake, triggering a literal rat race for higher ground. Since then farming communities in more than 20 counties near Dongting have been overrun, observers say. "For the past week, the situation has been very serious," Tan Lulu, who works for...

Beijing -- Developed countries are hypocritical for criticising China's greenhouse gas emissions while buying products from its booming manufacturing industry, the Chinese government said. The comments yesterday were aimed at defending the country's environmental record after a report said it had become the world's top carbon dioxide emitter. China overtook the US in carbon dioxide emissions by about 7.5 per cent in 2006, according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency's report this week. While China was 2 per cent below the US in carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, voracious coal consumption and increased cement production caused the numbers to rise...

China’s emergence as the world’s biggest polluter will intensify the pressure it feels from the rest of the world to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, climate campaigner Al Gore says. Figures released this week showed that China might already have overtaken the US as the biggest emitter of the main gas, carbon dioxide. “I think that when China is recognised as the largest emitter — it may have happened this week or it may happen next year — it will produce a subtle but significant change in the pressure China feels from the rest of the world to be part...

For millennia China's great rivers have snaked their long meandering courses across the country, providing lifeblood for Chinese civilisation. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, five thousand years of history and culture have unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity and dynamism in its wake. But the effects of chronic pollution, large-scale damming and climate change are combining to spell catastrophe for the rivers. Ten per cent of the Yellow River today is sewage. Little surprise when, according to the government, the volume of wastewater...

China said yesterday that it is unfair for rich countries to buy its cheap goods and then condemn its greenhouse gas pollution, a day after one study suggested the nation was already the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said other countries need to consider China's role as a low-cost export powerhouse that in effect helps rich Western consumers avoid emissions at home. "China is now the factory of the world," Qin told a regular news briefing in Beijing. "The developed countries have moved a lot of manufacturing to China. What many Western consumers wear, live...

China has deployed 11 highly trained professionals to sniff out foul gases and other dangerous chemicals in the air of what is rapidly becoming one of the most polluted countries. The State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory for Controlling Evil Odours and Pollution in the northern city of Tianjin had put its students on a rigorous – if somewhat unpleasant – course, which involved sniffing 25 bottles of liquids with various odours. “We have to stay in a lab smelling those awful gases repeatedly,” Liu Jingcai, deputy director of the bureau, said. The 11 newly fledged experts, all working for the...

Not far from the old Silk Road, Chinese government scientists have begun boring holes deep into granite in the first steps toward building what could become the world's largest tomb for nuclear waste. As governments worldwide look at nuclear power as a possible answer to global warming, China has embarked on a nuclear-plant construction binge that eventually could exceed the one the United States undertook during the technology's heyday in the 1960s. Under plans already announced, China intends to spend $50 billion to build 32 nuclear plants by 2020. Some analysts say the country will build 300 more by the...

Discarded cigarette packets, fast food wrappers and even old socks litter the shores of Lau Fau Shan in Hong Kong’s far north, home to what remains of the territory’s oyster farming industry. From across the border in China, factories belch smoke into the fetid air over Deep Bay, one of Hong Kong’s most polluted stretches of water. Ten years after the territory was handed back to the Chinese, pollution is one of the biggest problems facing the former British colony as it bears the environmental consequences of China’s rampant economic growth. For around a third of last year, Hong Kong’s...

BEIJING - A pale orange sun hangs low over the evening rush hour, a brake-light procession of Mercedes, matchbox-size taxis and accordion-style buses that cuts through a canyon of skyscraper construction cranes. On this spring evening, as on most days, this city of 15 million souls is wrapped in a churning brown gauze of foul fumes and gritty dirt. "It's a pretty strong cocktail of dust particulates, industrial and automotive pollution," observed Jeremy Goldkorn, a 12-year Beijing resident and Internet entrepreneur. "It's something a lot of expatriates, especially people from Northern California, find very difficult. You blow your nose and...

The lives of residents in a village in northern China are being destroyed by high rates of cancer and what is claimed to be cerebral palsy among their children yet no one has come up with an answer. With one of his meaty hands, Xing Fengshan pushes a red and gold box of Honghe cigarettes across the table to me. We haven't even eaten lunch and the thickset northern Chinese has all but smoked his way through a whole packet. A thought flickers across my mind that I should warn him of the dangers to his health. Yet such...

About 60 percent of Chinese cities still suffer from air pollution and have no centralized sewage treatment facilities, according to a report by the State environment watchdog. The report, issued by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) yesterday, rated air and water pollution as major environmental problems in the urban areas of 585 cities. The air quality in only 37.6 percent of the cities was above Grade II, a national standard indicating a clean and healthy environment. The figure was 7.3 percentage points lower than for 2005. Thirty-nine cities, four less than the number in 2005, were put on SEPA's...

Guiyu is a modern day gold rush town. But instead of panning for gold in babbling streams, workers shift through piles of broken old computer parts in acrid smelling shacks, smelting down parts with crude equipment to extract valuable metals like gold and copper. Every year, millions of unwanted computers, keyboards, television sets and cell phones are smuggled into China by sea. Much ends up in Guiyu, a rough town on the southern Chinese coast, not far from the former British colony of Hong Kong. There is little regard for safety—no masks, little ventilation and few signs of government officials...

The water purity of a river tapped to make China's national liquor is being threatened by uncontrolled building of other drinks factories along its banks, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. Kweichow Moutai, maker of the fiery Maotai drink served at Chinese state banquets and used to toast guests ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Kim Il-sung, draws water for the brew from the Chishui River in remote southwest Guizhou province. But authorities are investigating how 39 illegal alcoholic drinks plants have sprung up by the river, polluting both the air and water, Xinhua said. "It seriously threatens the...

China's leadership knows the Olympics may define the country's international image for decades. So officials have spared nothing in their efforts to show how green they can be. On clear days it's now possible to look down Changan Avenue and see the peaks of the Western Hills, which had been obscured for years. Most homes and businesses have converted from coal heat to natural gas, many diesel-belching tractors and trucks have been banned from city streets, and 58% of sewage is treated. Beijing has moved nearly 130 factories out of the city and is building cleaner, gas-fueled power stations while...