The River Runs Black

The Environmental Challenge to China's Future

Elizabeth C. Economy

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801449246
• eBook ISBN: 9780801458200
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

China's spectacular economic growth over the past two decades has dramatically depleted the country's natural resources and produced skyrocketing rates of pollution. Environmental degradation in China has also contributed to significant public health problems, mass migration, economic loss, and social unrest. In The River Runs Black, Elizabeth C. Economy examines China's growing environmental crisis and its implications for the country's future development.

Drawing on historical research, case studies, and interviews with officials, scholars, and activists in China, Economy traces the economic and political roots of China's environmental challenge and the evolution of the leadership's response. She argues that China's current approach to environmental protection mirrors the one embraced for economic development: devolving authority to local officials, opening the door to private actors, and inviting participation from the international community, while retaining only weak central control.

The result has been a patchwork of environmental protection in which a few wealthy regions with strong leaders and international ties improve their local environments, while most of the country continues to deteriorate, sometimes suffering irrevocable damage. Economy compares China's response with the experience of other societies and sketches out several possible futures for the country.

This second edition of The River Runs Black is updated with information about events between 2005 and 2009, covering China's tumultuous transformation of its economy and its landscape as it deals with the political implications of this behavior as viewed by an international community ever more concerned about climate change and dwindling energy resources.

CHAPTER ONE

THE DEATH OF THE HUAI RIVER

In late July 2001, the fertile Huai River Valley—China’s breadbasket—was the site of an environmental disaster. Heavy rains flooded the river’s tributaries, flushing more than 38 billion gallons of highly polluted water into the Huai.¹ Downstream, in Anhui Province, the river water was thick with garbage, yellow foam, and dead fish.² Although the authorities quickly proclaimed the situation under control, the incident represented a stunning failure for China’s leadership. Only seven months earlier, the government had proclaimed its success in cleaning up the Huai. A six-year campaign to rid the region of polluting factories that dumped their wastewater into the river had ostensibly raised the quality of the water in the river and its more than one hundred tributaries to the point that people could once again fish, irrigate their crops, and even drink from the river.

The story of the Huai River over the past five decades epitomizes the saga of environmental change in China. It’s a paradoxical tale, one that holds out the promise of significant change in the future, while exposing the failures of China’s current environmental practices, many of which are rooted in centuries-old traditions.

The Huai River Valley, including Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Henan Provinces, is a fertile region in eastern China. It is roughly the size of En gland with a population of over 150 million people, all of whom depend on the Huai for their water supply. The river originates in Henan’s Tongbai Mountain and flows east for over six hundred miles through Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu Provinces before flowing into the Yangtze River.

The Huai River Valley is a relatively prosperous region, with average per capita incomes in 2007 ranging from about $950 in Anhui to almost $1,680 in Jiangsu.³ Long known for its rich supply of grain, cotton, oil, and fish, the river basin has over the past twenty-five years become home to tens of thousands of small factories. Paper and pulp mills, chemical factories, and dyeing and tanning plants, employing anywhere from ten to several thousand people, have sprouted all along the banks of the river and its tributaries, driving much of the economic dynamism of the region and the nation. They have also freely dumped their waste into the river, making the Huai China’s fourth most polluted river system.⁴

The Huai River boasts a dramatic and tumultuous history. In 1950, disastrous flooding prompted Mao Zedong to create the Huai River Basin Commission. As part of Mao’s campaign to control rivers, the Commission commandeered tens of millions of Chinese to construct no fewer than 195 dams along the Huai.⁵ In August 1975, two of the largest dams, Shimantan and Banqiao, collapsed, killing an estimated 230,000 people.⁶

The dams have also contributed to the numerous pollution disasters that have plagued the Huai River for more than two decades. Local officials upstream have repeatedly opened the sluice gates of the dams, releasing polluted water that has poisoned crops and fish downstream thereby ruining local farms and fisheries. The problem is compounded by the roughly four thousand reservoirs constructed along the river, which limit the river’s capacity to dilute the pollutants.⁷ In many stretches of the river, the water is unfit for drinking.

Despite relatively high average annual rainfall of thirty-four inches, many parts of the river basin are also prone to drought,⁸ worsening the concentration of pollutants. Along some parts of the river, people have long recorded higher than normal rates of cancer and birth defects. According to one estimate, the death rate along one stretch of the main river is one third above the provincial average, and the cancer rates are twice the provincial average.⁹ A report on the region in the late 1990s also notes that “for years no boy from [certain villages in] the Huai River area has been healthy enough to pass the physical examination required to enter the army.”¹⁰

The Chinese leadership has not been unaware of the river’s growing pollution. After the first pollution disaster in 1974, the Chinese leadership in Beijing established the Huai River Valley Bureau of Water Resources Protection and the Huai River Conservancy Commission of the Ministry of Water Resources. These offices had no funding and no real authority, however, and as the region developed economically, the environment deteriorated rapidly. As one official from China’s central environmental agency, the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) described the situation, “Economic development had just occurred blindly.”¹¹ In 1988, Beijing established a central government agency, the Leading Group on Water Resources Protection for the Huai River Basin, raising the profile of the problem at least bureaucratically. But by 1990, to cut costs and realize greater profits, fewer than half of the factories in the valley were operating their waste disposal systems, and only 25 percent of treated wastewater met state standards. Sensing impending disaster, the Bureau of Water Resources Protection pressed local officials to close down or retrofit some of the most egregious polluters. Some were closed, but others quickly opened in their stead.¹²

Moreover, the four provinces dependent on the Huai were incapable of coordinating a policy to address the problem. By 1993, the director of the Bureau of Water Resources Protection was complaining to no avail about the rising number of interprovincial disputes over the Huai and the lack of any authority capable of resolving them. In May 1994, Beijing responded—at last—to the warnings of the local environmental officials and, perhaps, to the growing social unrest in the region.¹³ The country’s top environmental oversight body, the State Environmental Protection Commission (SEPC), under the auspices of the State Council, convened a meeting in Anhui Province to discuss the problem of provincial cooperation on environmental issues. But the meeting produced no tangible change in policy or practice.

Just two months later, a number of factories along the Huai emptied their waste tanks directly into the river, producing a toxic mix of ammonia and nitrogen compounds, potassium permanganate, and phenols, contaminating the middle and lower reaches of the river. The water turned black, and factories were forced to close down. Fisheries were destroyed, almost 26 million pounds of fish were killed, and thousands of people were treated for dysentery, diarrhea, and vomiting.¹⁴ In the immediate aftermath, local authorities in one town (Bengbu, Anhui) released polluted water that had been pent up by their local dam. During the following two weeks, more than 52 billion gallons of polluted river water were released. As the media flocked to the scene, local officials attempted to hide the extent of the disaster; in response, villagers pelted the officials with eggs.¹⁵

The central leadership immediately dispatched an investigation team, headed by Song Jian, the highly respected chairman of the SEPC. During the team’s visit, a peasant offered Song a glass of the river water to drink. After sipping from the cup, Song invited the provincial and local officials to finish the glass, informing them simultaneously that if they did not clean up the river, they would be fired.¹⁶ Some action followed. Reportedly nearly one thousand factories were closed down or relocated; others received a three-year grace period until 1997 to improve their environmental practices. Premier Li Peng announced a two-stage campaign: first, to halt all industrial waste pollution by 1997; and second, to have the river run clear by 2000.

To accomplish these goals, the State Council established an interministerial subcommission including the Ministry of Water Resources, the State Planning Commission, and the Ministry of Finance, among others.¹⁷ Then director of NEPA Xie Zhenhua announced specific steps to improve the situation: nineteen industrial firms in four provinces were given specific targets to meet. In 1996, hundreds of polluting factories along the Huai were closed.

Yet the imperative of economic development continued to overwhelm environmental concerns. As Cang Yuxiang, a member of NEPA’s Pollution Control Division, reported in 1997:

They [local industries and regions] pay attention only to short-term interests to the detriment of the long-term, or their own area to the detriment of the entire river basin and, disregarding the harm done to others, allow large amounts of wastewater to flow to other areas…. Towns and villages continue to blindly build small paper mills, dye works, tanneries, and chemical plants with crude equipment, despite the government already having temporarily closed down some such 5,000 factories during the cleanup process…. Most of the water in the river system is rated at levels 4 and 5 (on a scale ranging from 1 to 5, the higher numbers indicating greater pollution) with some of the tributaries even failing to meet the number five standards and in the dry season basically becoming wastewater sewers.¹⁸

There were additional reports that the equipment from the shuttered enterprises was being sold to other factories,¹⁹ and the U.S. Embassy reported that within two years, 40 percent of the closed factories had reopened.

Still, the government pressed on with the second stage of its campaign. On January 1, 1998, the Chinese leadership launched the three-year Zero Hour Operation (Lingdian Xingdong) to clean up the Huai River. In short order, local officials closed down 35 factories and halted production at an additional 198 plants.²⁰ Yet researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Rural Development Institute voiced their doubts concerning the future efficacy of the campaign:

It is very unlikely that very serious regional pollution can be solved through the Zero Hour Operation…. Before the Zero Hour Operation arrives, many polluters will suspend discharging waste until the NEPA finishes its examinations…. The situation is unlikely to be reversed in the near future. It is difficult for the state to collect pollution discharge fees from small and scattered factories. They don’t produce any proper accounts and no one can be sure about their finances.²¹

In discussing the problem, one of China’s leading environmentalists at the time reported on the tactics used by factories along the Huai for avoiding closure. He commented that some of the small paper and pulp mills banded together to form large plants in order to evade government regulations on the size of the factories; other factories closed down during the day but operated at night. Moreover, local governments, fearful of economic loss, exerted enormous pressure on environmental protection officials not to pursue the campaign aggressively. The Chinese investigative television program Newsprobe paid two visits to the region in 2000, first to report on the efforts to clean up the river and then to assess their success. Not surprisingly, during the second visit, Newsprobe discovered that many factories that should have been closed were still operating.²²

Reports of problems multiplied. In January 1998, just after the initial Zero Hour push, the water in Xiuzhou, an industrial city downstream from one of the Huai’s tributaries, turned black, the fish died, and the residents were without running water for two weeks. (A few days earlier, the government had announced that the Huai was well on its way to “environmental resurrection.”)²³ One resident complained to a foreign journalist, “The water here is always polluted. It’s really serious. We can’t even wash our clothes in this water. And when we tried to give it to the pigs, the pigs refused to eat for a couple of days.”²⁴

A second especially egregious case of continued pollution of the Huai involved Fuyang in Anhui Province, whose wastewater flows into the Huai. In 1999, Fuyang was designated one of China’s ten “Clean Industry Cities.” Yet in May 2000, ten residents of Fuyang collapsed along the city’s main sewage outlet known as the Seven-Li Trench. Six of the ten died from exposure to the contaminated water. While the Fuyang government had already spent almost $600,000 on a system of sluice gates designed to control the flow of wastewater, they refused to spend the $30 million needed to clean up the wastewater that flowed through the gates into the Huai, arguing that attacking the problem aggressively would require the closure of much of the city’s industrial base.²⁵ The residents of Fuyang were well aware of the dangers of the polluted water; when the sluice gate emptying waste from the city’s main industrial area was open, the water turned black and a foul smell and haze emanated from it. Although the local villagers had complained publicly about the Seven-Li Trench, their complaints probably died with unsympathetic local officials. A television news team that reported on Fuyang in 1999, for example, edited a farmer’s criticism to sound like praise. It emerged that Fuyang’s designation as a “Clean Industry City” was the result of a deception common to many cities: Local factory officials were always warned before environmental inspectors arrived, and they ensured that their factories passed the inspections by shutting off waste outlets and flushing systems with clean running water.²⁶

Fuyang now faces severe water shortages. The local groundwater is so polluted that the city has been forced to dig wells deeper and deeper, causing severe subsidence. According to one report, “[U]nder-ground water [is now] completely drained.”²⁷

In 1999 and 2000, the Huai ran dry for the first time in twenty years.²⁸ Shipping came to a halt as boats were left “high and dry in the mud.”²⁹ In Hongze Lake downstream, residents “witnessed the ghostly walls of Sizhou, a city submerged by floods some 300 years ago, emerging into the light.”³⁰ The local economy was hit hard with crops ruined and thousands of tons of fish dead.

Despite such reports, in January 2001, Xie Zhenhua, then the head of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (called the National Environmental Protection Agency until March 1998 and the Ministry of Environmental Protection since March 2008), stepped forward to claim that the water quality on the Huai River had reached the national III standard—suitable for drinking and fishing—and that 70 percent of the major tributaries had reached IV—suitable for industry and agriculture.³¹ The People’s Daily, China’s foremost government newspaper, claimed that the kind of cleanup that had taken other countries twenty years to accomplish had been achieved by the Chinese in just a few years.

In the past, such assertions might have passed unchallenged. No more. On January 18, the Worker’s Daily printed a front-page article asserting that the government’s campaign had failed. Su Kiasheng, professor at Huainan Industrial College and vice-chairman of Anhui’s People’s political Co...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE: THE DEATH OF THE HUAI RIVER
• CHAPTER TWO: A LEGACY OF EXPLOITATION
• CHAPTER THREE: THE ECONOMIC EXPLOSION AND ITS ENVIRONMENTAL COST
• CHAPTER FOUR: THE CHALLENGE OF GREENING CHINA
• CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW POLITICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT
• CHAPTER SIX: THE DEVIL AT THE DOORSTEP
• CHAPTER SEVEN: LESSONS FROM ABROAD
• CHAPTER EIGHT: AVERTING THE CRISIS
• NOTES