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3 Beijing dips its toes in troubled
waters By Pallavi Aiyar
people of Harbin were initially
told that their water supply was cut off for
maintenance works, and the real reason was only
made public almost 10 days after the blast
occurred. It was six days before Jilin officials
even informed their counterparts in Heilongjiang
about the spillage, ostensibly to "avoid spreading
panic".
"The biggest challenge those
fighting pollution face is really this
lack
of transparency and accountability in China," said
Ma. The efforts of IPEA to "name and shame"
polluters by listing them on the Internet is part
of the wider fight to create greater transparency
and public participation, he said.
Redressing pollution purely from the top
down through administrative measures, Ma argues,
will be doomed in the absence of a more active
civil society. The danger for China, he says, is
that if the emergence of organized civil society
in the form of more open media and independent
NGOs is thwarted, people will be left with little
choice but to voice their protests by violent
means and riots.
Several of the 87,000
"mass incidents" that took place across the
country in 2005 were village-level protests
against polluted water and the corruption that was
perceived to be at its root. Thus in April of that
year 10,000 rioters in Huaxi village in Zhejiang
province attacked police after accusing officials
of allowing a chemical factory to pollute the
river and groundwater, allegedly resulting in
stillborn babies and birth defects. A few months
later in Xichang village close to Shanghai, a
15,000-villager-strong demonstration against
toxic-waste discharges from a pharmaceutical plant
believed to have polluted irrigation water and
stunted local crops turned into a pitched battle
with the police.
Pollution is widely
believed to be linked to the increase in different
kinds of cancers in China in recent decades.
Liver-cancer deaths, which are particularly
associated with water pollution, have doubled
since the 1990s. A recent survey released by the
Ministry of Health showed cancer to be China's top
killer, accounting for 23% of deaths in rural
areas and 19% in cities.
Reports on
"cancer villages" in the media have also become a
frequent occurrence. One such village is Liukuai
Zhuang near Tianjin city, an hour or so east of
Beijing. According to a People's Daily report,
water pollution in Liukuai Zhuang drove up the
cancer rates in the village to 25 times the
national average in 2004.
The village is
in an area where dozens of chemical factories have
set up shop since the 1980s, bringing jobs and
prosperity in their wake. Tianjin municipality is
one of the wealthiest in the region. However,
uncontrolled discharges from the same factories
also led to severe pollution of water sources,
ultimately causing long-term damage to residents'
health.
Water pollution and the corruption
that allows it have thus emerged as some of the
most politically sensitive issues in contemporary
China with the power to threaten the ruling
party's legitimacy by threatening the social
stability so crucial to the Chinese Communist
Party's continuing rule.
But addressing
water pollution is not merely a matter of
targeting industrial polluters. According to
Andres Liebenthal, head of the World Bank's
environment and social division in Beijing,
industrial pollution only accounts for one-third
of total water pollution in China. Another third
is the result of municipal waste, with the final
third consisting of the runoff from fields
contaminated by pesticide and fertilizer.
The country pays a heavy economic price
for water pollution. Liebenthal puts its
cumulative health and economic cost at some 2.3%
of China's GDP per annum, a figure roughly equal
to the entire yearly education budget of the
government.
The loss to the economy from
depletion of groundwater, for example, is
estimated at 50 billion yuan (US$6.5 billion), the
costs to industry of using polluted water another
50 billion yuan. The economic cost of the health
impact of pollution, including diarrhea and
cancers, is placed at 0.5% of GDP.
The
economic impact of the water scarcity that
pollution contributes to will only increase as
China's economy continues to industrialize and
urbanization steps up, with tens of millions of
peasants from the countryside expected to move to
cities in the coming years.
Already, Ma
points out, 400 out of 650 large cities in China
suffer from water scarcity, more than 100 to a
critical level. Liebenthal adds that of a total of
55 million hectares of arable land in China, 7
million cannot be irrigated at all because of the
water shortages. Another 20 million hectares
suffer from water deficiency.
China's
water shortage caused in part by pollution is
aggravated by climate change. According to Li Yan,
a campaigner with the NGO Greenpeace's China
office, glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau,
the source region for many of the country's
waterways, including the Yangtze and Yellow
rivers, are retreating at frightening speeds. She
says the latest report by the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns
that if global warming continues at current
levels, 80% of all Himalayan glaciers could
disappear by 2035.
Liu of URCWP says that
while climate change leads to greater
precipitation in some areas, it conversely leads
to water shortages in others. As an example he
points to the fact that rainfall in Beijing has
continuously been 20-30% lower than average since
1998.
The northern part of China, always
water-deficient, has begun to suffer from severe
drought, he says. In the 1980s, the north
accounted for 19% of China's total water
resources. This proportion has now dropped to 16%,
a change Liu attributes to climate change.
The third factor contributing to China's
water crisis is inefficient use of water. Aside
from pollution and global warming, the fact that
water is heavily subsidized in China means that
neither farmers nor ordinary consumers have any
incentive to save water
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