China struggles to balance economic growth, environment

XIANGTAN, China -- Tired and frustrated, Wang Guoxiang and other city officials were having a midnight snack of instant noodles Jan. 6 when the antipollution chief for Hunan Province walked into their crisis room. Immediately, Wang said, he stopped eating and shouted at the visitor.

At the top of his voice, he insisted that something be done to stop the discharge of poisonous metals that had begun three days earlier into the Xiang River, from which Xiangtan, 800 miles south of Beijing, draws its drinking water.

As a people's delegate, Wang recalled telling the environmental official, he and others had been fighting for months for more controls on upstream smelters but had found little support from the provincial authorities.

''You guys pay no attention to the safety of drinking water for our Xiangtan people. If you can't solve the problem this time, your position is in danger," Wang said he had told a local antipollution chief, Jiang Yimin. ''And I wasn't kidding."

The late-night confrontation in Xiangtan, a city of 500,000, was a telling episode in China's latest pollution drama: It involved the accidental release into the Xiang River of heavy doses of cadmium, a likely carcinogen, by a state-owned smelter in an industrial park, about 25 miles upstream.

The fouling of the Xiang River attracted wide attention, but it was far from unique; China has been trying to reconcile rapid economic growth with protection of the environment. After more than two decades of swift industrialization, a recent government report found that up to 70 percent of the country's rivers and lakes are seriously polluted.

In reaction, national regulations have been put into place, including a government decision Sunday requiring local officials to immediately notify officials in Beijing of any toxic spills.

But enforcement of environmental rules has often been lax, and the result has been frequent contamination of the waterways that China's 1.3 billion people depend on for drinking water.

At about the same time that Xiangtan faced its pollution crisis, a frozen pipe burst in eastern Henan Province, releasing 6 tons of diesel fuel that floated in a 40-mile-long slick down a branch of the Yellow River. Authorities said 63 water pumps had to be shut down, including some at Jinan, the capital of neighboring Shandong Province.

On Tuesday, farther south, Guangdong provincial authorities announced that water drawn from the Bei River was safe to drink again, three weeks after an unauthorized discharge of cadmium.

And last fall, a spill in the northern Songhua River drew worldwide attention as it wended its way to the Amur River in eastern Russia.

Xie Shaodong, an environmental specialist at Peking University in Beijing, said China is passing through a stage of economic development in which, as the history of other countries has shown, ecological damage is to be expected.

To halt the degradation, he said, China's environmental protection agencies should be granted more power and the news media should be allowed to report more fully on the issue.

Although pollution has long been recognized as a major problem in China, local officials and the government-controlled press have focused particular attention on it recently because of the embarrassing spill in November.

In that episode, benzene contamination of the Songhua River forced a cutoff of drinking water in Harbin, 650 miles north of Beijing.

It also sent toxic waste downstream to cities and towns in the Russian Far East, along the Amur.

Local officials made the Songhua incident worse by concealing it for several days, leading to complaints from Russia and, ultimately, sanctions from China's central government and the new notification rule issued Sunday.

Officials involved in the cover-up were dismissed and one committed suicide.

But as Wang's experience in Xiangtan showed, the reaction of many officials is still to conceal and minimize.

Only hours before Jiang walked into the Xiangtan crisis meeting that evening, Wang had learned that the city's Environmental Protection Administration had measured cadmium levels at 25 times the amount considered safe for drinking water. His own measurement, Wang said, showed even higher levels.

Cadmium, a soft element found in metal ores, can cause liver, kidney, and bone disease if ingested in large quantities.

For most of the year, Wang said, he and two colleagues in the People's Congress, had been trying to persuade provincial authorities to tighten controls over the smelters upstream from Xiangtan, which he said frequently dump dangerous quantities of cadmium and other elements into the river.

Frustrated by the lack of response at the provincial level, Wang had arranged for Xiangtan's Environmental Protection Administration to test the water every 10 days. When he received the report last week, ''I just couldn't believe my eyes," he said in an interview.

Wang alerted Communist Party officials in the city, who met into the night.

Jiang made his appearance at the meetings at about midnight and, before dawn, set in motion a large-scale cleanup operation along the tainted river.

Later that day, he and provincial environment officials announced at a news conference that the cadmium would be neutralized with chemicals dumped into the river and diluted with water diverted from reservoirs.

The cadmium entered the Xiang River on Jan. 4, when workers mistakenly diverted river water into two basins used to separate cadmium and other byproducts, Wang said