Reckless development blamed for fouling of China's waters

KUNMING, China -- The stench from Dian Lake smothers the tiny farming hamlets that dot its shores.

Until 2002, the lake supplied drinking water to Kunming, the scenic capital of southern Yunnan Province, and provided a rich bounty for fishermen and a playground for tourists. Now, untreated human sewage and chemical waste have turned the 116-square-mile lake into a toxic cesspool.

''We used to swim here as kids," Yu Hui Zhen, a local farmer, said as she crinkled her nose and gingerly toed the thick layer of green goop on the surface of the lake. ''Now people are afraid to even step in here."

Dian Lake's problems are a microcosm of how the environmentally reckless development of China's provincial cities is devastating the country's lakes and rivers, activists say.

Traditionally, Yunnan's tropical climes turned the villages around Dian into prosperous flower-growing, farming, and fishing centers. But in the early 1990s, when paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was exhorting China to get rich, a string of paper and chemical factories sprang up in the area and began dumping untreated waste into the lake, the country's sixth-largest.

Although the central government declared Dian an environmentally damaged site in the mid-1990s and announced several multimillion-dollar initiatives to clean up its waters, local factories continue to dump untreated waste into its waters at night, said Yu Xiao Gang, director of Green Watershed, a local environmental nongovernmental organization involved in trying to stop the lake's pollution.

Like many Chinese lakes, Dian's water-quality grade is now lower than the lowest grade officially allowed by the Chinese government. Environmentalists and some government officials agree that the fallout from China's short-sighted development policies is forcing Beijing to reconsider its development priorities.

''An environmental crisis is coming to China earlier than expected, especially water pollution," Pan Yue, vice chairman of China's State Environmental Protection Agency, said in a recent interview in Beijing. ''We will face tremendous problems if we do not change our development patterns."

He said that three of the seven major river basins in China are polluted, and 90 percent of the rivers running through cities suffer from severe pollution. More than 300 million rural residents do not have access to clean water.

Last month, Premier Wen Jiabao vowed to devote about $25 billion toward environmental protection and to refrain from pursuing growth and development projects at the expense of the environment.

But Pan said many provincial governments, including Yunnan's, continue to fly in the face of Beijing's directives, underlining how the central government is losing control of regional party bosses.

Over the last decade local planners have transformed Kunming from a sleepy town into a regional metropolis of 3 million. While this has boosted the local economy, Kunming's city government, squeezed like other local governments by reductions in direct financial support from Beijing, has struggled to cope with growing administrative burdens.

National environmental standards call for lakes into which sewage is emptied to have water treatment plants, but Kunming's local government says it does not have the money to regularly operate the six water-treatment plants on Dian Lake. ''The treatment plants are like giant showpieces and only switched on when investors or officials from Beijing visit," said Yu, of Green Watershed.

Villagers along Dian's shores say the death of the lake that once provided most of their livelihood has cast a long shadow over their lives. ''We catch less fish in the lake now," Wang Cheng, 40, said as he emptied a pail of carp-like fish into a concrete holding tank at a local store. ''Sales have also gone down quite a bit as people think they'll have health problems if they eat fish from here."

Fishermen insist that the water in the center of the lake is clean and that fish caught there are fine to eat. But Sun Jing, an activist with local nonprofit group Pesticides Eco-Alternatives, cautioned otherwise. She said farmers use the toxic herbicide Paraquat, which gets flushed into the lake. Exposure to the chemical has been linked to damage of the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system.

Yu said such problems are roiling China because local people are still denied a real voice in governance. ''The local government doesn't want to control the source of the pollution -- the polluter -- and doesn't want citizens to participate in environmental protection, either," said Yu, who added that he has been detained by local police several times for his activism.

Even as Dian Lake deteriorates, Yunnan is pushing to build a series of huge dams across the Yangtze and Nu rivers that flow through the province. Provincial officials say the dams could provide all of southern China with water and 21 million kilowatts of electricity per year, more than what the controversial Three Gorges Dam farther east along the Yangtze is expected to produce.

But the plan has angered conservationists and local residents. They say the planned Tiger Leaping Gorge Dam across the Jingsha River, as the Yangtze is called in this area, would create a 150-square-mile reservoir that would displace more than 100,000 people and destroy more than 200 distinct plant and animal species.

It would also submerge the Jade Dragon Protected Area, which has been designated a world heritage cultural area by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and includes the spot Yunnan officials have declared the real site of the fabled city of Shangri-La.

''Not only is this ecologically destructive, it is economically short-sighted," Yu said. ''Tourism is a major earner for this area, but the dam will end up destroying this tourism [because] it will . . . flood out the entire civilizations of minority groups like the Miao, Dai, and Naxi," which are popular with tourists.

In a show of anger over the proposed dams, villagers pushed a visiting county vice governor into the Jingsha River last month. He was not injured.

The central government has put the projects on hold, but Yunnan authorities have sealed public access to the dam sites and warned villagers not to collaborate with environmental activists.

Local officials determined to go ahead with the project have a powerful motivation: Under the revenue-sharing arrangement between Beijing and the provinces, cash-strapped Yunnan would get 70 percent of the income generated by the projects, Yu said.

But the greater concern for activists is that China has evolved its own version of pork-barrel politics. ''A nexus between local officials and contractors" has created powerful vested interests for building large public-works projects, Yu said.

''Ecology demands that we use less, but they want us to use more," Yu said. ''At a time when there is a national move to conserve energy . . . the Yunnan government recently ran an advertising campaign telling people to support the province by consuming more electricity."