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Washington Post
September 12, 2004
Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer
By JIM YARDLEY
UANGMENGYING, China - Wang Lincheng began his accounting at the brick hut of a farmer. Dead of cancer, he said flatly, his dress shoes sinking in the mud. Dead of cancer, he repeated, glancing at another vacant house.
Mr. Wang, head of the Communist Party in this village, ignored a June rain and trudged past mud-brick houses, ticking off other deaths, other empty homes. He did not seem to notice a small cornfield where someone had dug a burial mound of fresh red dirt.
Finally, he stopped at the door of a sickened young mother. Her home was beside a stream turned greenish-black from dumping by nearby factories - polluted water that had contaminated drinking wells. Cancer had been rare when the stream was clear, but last year cancer accounted for 13 of the 17 deaths in the village.
"All the water we drink around here is polluted," Mr. Wang said. "You can taste it. It's acrid and bitter. Now the victims are starting to come out, people dying of cancer and tumors and unusual causes."
The stream in Huangmengying is one tiny canal in the Huai River basin, a vast system that has become a grossly polluted waste outlet for thousands of factories in central China. There are 150 million people in the Huai basin, many of them poor farmers now threatened by water too toxic to touch, much less drink.
Pollution is pervasive in China, as anyone who has visited the smog-choked cities can attest. On the World Bank's list of 20 cities with the worst air, 16 are Chinese. But leaders are now starting to clean up major cities, partly because urbanites with rising incomes are demanding better air and water. In Beijing and Shanghai, officials are forcing out the dirtiest polluters to prepare for the 2008 Olympics.
By contrast, the countryside, home to two-thirds of China's population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Refineries and smelters forced out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign companies, to escape regulation at home.
The losers are hundreds of millions of peasants already at the bottom of a society now sharply divided between rich and poor. They are farmers and fishermen who depend on land and water for their basic existence.
In July and August, officials measured an 82-mile band of polluted water moving through the Huai basin. China rates its waterways on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being too toxic even to touch. This water was rated 5. For fishermen, it may as well have been poison. "If I had wanted to, I could have gone on the river and filled a boat with dead fish," said Song Dexi, 64, a fisherman in Yumin. "It was smelly, like toilet water. All our fish and shrimp died. We don't have anything to live on now."
The Huai was supposed to be a Communist Party success story. Ten years ago, the central government vowed to clean up the basin after a pollution tide killed fish and sickened thousands of people. Three years ago, a top Chinese official called the cleanup a success. But the Huai is now a symbol of the failure of environmental regulation in China. The central government promotes big solutions but gives regulators little power to enforce them. Local officials have few incentives to crack down on polluters because their promotion system is based primarily on economic growth, not public health.
It is a game that leaves poorer, rural regions clinging to the worst polluters.
"No doubt there is an economic food chain, and the lower you are, the worse off your environmental problems are likely to be," said Elizabeth C. Economy, author of "The River Runs Black" (Cornell University Press, 2004), a study of China's environment. "One city after the next is offloading its polluting industries outside its city limits, and polluting industries themselves are seeking poorer areas."
China is facing an ecological and health crisis. Heavy air pollution contributes to respiratory illnesses that kill up to 300,000 people a year, many in cities but also in rural areas, the World Bank estimates. Liver and stomach cancer, linked in some studies to water pollution, are among the leading causes of death in the countryside.
"Over the past 20 years in China, there has been a single-minded focus on economic growth with the belief that economic growth can solve all problems," said Pan Yue, the outspoken deputy director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration. "But this has left environmental protection badly behind."
Too Poor to Flee, or to Get Well
Few places bear that out more than eastern Henan Province, which includes Huangmengying. The isolated region has tanneries, paper mills and other high-polluting industries dumping directly into the rivers.
One of the biggest polluters is the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, China's largest producer of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the flavor enhancer. But the company's political influence is so vast that environmental regulators who have tried to challenge the company have done so in vain.
The Huai River basin has neither the history of the Yellow River nor the mystique of the Yangtze. Yet the Huai, with its spider's web of canals and broad tributaries, irrigates a huge swath of China's agricultural heartland.
Farmers once spent lifetimes tilling the same plot of corn or wheat. But in the past decade, millions of farmers, unable to earn a living from the land, have left Henan for migrant work in cities, leaving behind villages of old people and young mothers.
One of those mothers is Kong Heqin, 30, who was the last stop on Mr. Wang's cancer tour in June. She stumbled into her dirt courtyard, disheveled and groggy from an afternoon nap. Her face was bloated and her legs were swollen. She had already had three operations for cancer, and new tumors were growing in her large intestine.
Earlier in the year, doctors had prescribed chemotherapy. But treatments cost $500 a series, nearly a year's income. She had borrowed $250 to pay spring school fees for her two sons, and she worried that chemotherapy would drain the family's meager resources away from her children.
So she stopped chemotherapy.
"We've wasted so much money on medical treatment," she said. "I think the best thing would be to give up on it."
Her rising medical bills were one reason her husband left a few years ago for construction work in a northern metropolis, Tianjin. He returns twice a year to plant or harvest crops. On good months, he sends home $60, but Ms. Kong says months go by with nothing in the mail.
Her illness shapes family life. Her elderly mother tends her husband's fields because she is too weak. Her sons wash the clothes. She grows a ragged garden in her courtyard because the pesticides coating vegetables at local markets make her sick. The plate of boiled eggs on her dresser was a gift from sympathetic relatives.
Asked about pollution, she seemed confused, as if unaware of the concept. But she has noticed that her well water smells bad and has changed in taste. She knows that others are sick, too. "There's a family next door with a case of cancer," she said. "But they don't like to talk about it. People here are scared to talk about these things."
Epidemiological research for cancer in the Huai basin is scant. None has been done in Huangmengying. Nor does any scientific evidence prove that pollution is causing the rising cancer rate. What is clear is the wide range of pollutants, from fertilizer runoff to the dumping of factory wastes.
But Dr. Zhao Meiqin, chief of radiology at the county hospital, said cancer cases in the area rose sharply after heavy industry arrived in the 1980's and 90's. Before, the area had about 10 cases a year. "Now, in a year, there are hundreds of cases," she said, putting the number as high as 400, mostly stomach and intestinal tumors. "Originally, most of the patients were in their 50's and 60's. But now it tends to strike earlier. I've even treated one patient who is only 7."
Dr. Zhao said most cancer patients came from villages close to the factories along the Shaying River, a major tributary in the Huai basin. Mr. Wang, the village party chief, also said the highest concentrations of cancer were found in the homes closest to the village stream, which draws its water directly from the Shaying.
(Continued in next post)
September 12, 2004
Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer
By JIM YARDLEY
UANGMENGYING, China - Wang Lincheng began his accounting at the brick hut of a farmer. Dead of cancer, he said flatly, his dress shoes sinking in the mud. Dead of cancer, he repeated, glancing at another vacant house.
Mr. Wang, head of the Communist Party in this village, ignored a June rain and trudged past mud-brick houses, ticking off other deaths, other empty homes. He did not seem to notice a small cornfield where someone had dug a burial mound of fresh red dirt.
Finally, he stopped at the door of a sickened young mother. Her home was beside a stream turned greenish-black from dumping by nearby factories - polluted water that had contaminated drinking wells. Cancer had been rare when the stream was clear, but last year cancer accounted for 13 of the 17 deaths in the village.
"All the water we drink around here is polluted," Mr. Wang said. "You can taste it. It's acrid and bitter. Now the victims are starting to come out, people dying of cancer and tumors and unusual causes."
The stream in Huangmengying is one tiny canal in the Huai River basin, a vast system that has become a grossly polluted waste outlet for thousands of factories in central China. There are 150 million people in the Huai basin, many of them poor farmers now threatened by water too toxic to touch, much less drink.
Pollution is pervasive in China, as anyone who has visited the smog-choked cities can attest. On the World Bank's list of 20 cities with the worst air, 16 are Chinese. But leaders are now starting to clean up major cities, partly because urbanites with rising incomes are demanding better air and water. In Beijing and Shanghai, officials are forcing out the dirtiest polluters to prepare for the 2008 Olympics.
By contrast, the countryside, home to two-thirds of China's population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Refineries and smelters forced out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign companies, to escape regulation at home.
The losers are hundreds of millions of peasants already at the bottom of a society now sharply divided between rich and poor. They are farmers and fishermen who depend on land and water for their basic existence.
In July and August, officials measured an 82-mile band of polluted water moving through the Huai basin. China rates its waterways on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being too toxic even to touch. This water was rated 5. For fishermen, it may as well have been poison. "If I had wanted to, I could have gone on the river and filled a boat with dead fish," said Song Dexi, 64, a fisherman in Yumin. "It was smelly, like toilet water. All our fish and shrimp died. We don't have anything to live on now."
The Huai was supposed to be a Communist Party success story. Ten years ago, the central government vowed to clean up the basin after a pollution tide killed fish and sickened thousands of people. Three years ago, a top Chinese official called the cleanup a success. But the Huai is now a symbol of the failure of environmental regulation in China. The central government promotes big solutions but gives regulators little power to enforce them. Local officials have few incentives to crack down on polluters because their promotion system is based primarily on economic growth, not public health.
It is a game that leaves poorer, rural regions clinging to the worst polluters.
"No doubt there is an economic food chain, and the lower you are, the worse off your environmental problems are likely to be," said Elizabeth C. Economy, author of "The River Runs Black" (Cornell University Press, 2004), a study of China's environment. "One city after the next is offloading its polluting industries outside its city limits, and polluting industries themselves are seeking poorer areas."
China is facing an ecological and health crisis. Heavy air pollution contributes to respiratory illnesses that kill up to 300,000 people a year, many in cities but also in rural areas, the World Bank estimates. Liver and stomach cancer, linked in some studies to water pollution, are among the leading causes of death in the countryside.
"Over the past 20 years in China, there has been a single-minded focus on economic growth with the belief that economic growth can solve all problems," said Pan Yue, the outspoken deputy director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration. "But this has left environmental protection badly behind."
Too Poor to Flee, or to Get Well
Few places bear that out more than eastern Henan Province, which includes Huangmengying. The isolated region has tanneries, paper mills and other high-polluting industries dumping directly into the rivers.
One of the biggest polluters is the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, China's largest producer of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the flavor enhancer. But the company's political influence is so vast that environmental regulators who have tried to challenge the company have done so in vain.
The Huai River basin has neither the history of the Yellow River nor the mystique of the Yangtze. Yet the Huai, with its spider's web of canals and broad tributaries, irrigates a huge swath of China's agricultural heartland.
Farmers once spent lifetimes tilling the same plot of corn or wheat. But in the past decade, millions of farmers, unable to earn a living from the land, have left Henan for migrant work in cities, leaving behind villages of old people and young mothers.
One of those mothers is Kong Heqin, 30, who was the last stop on Mr. Wang's cancer tour in June. She stumbled into her dirt courtyard, disheveled and groggy from an afternoon nap. Her face was bloated and her legs were swollen. She had already had three operations for cancer, and new tumors were growing in her large intestine.
Earlier in the year, doctors had prescribed chemotherapy. But treatments cost $500 a series, nearly a year's income. She had borrowed $250 to pay spring school fees for her two sons, and she worried that chemotherapy would drain the family's meager resources away from her children.
So she stopped chemotherapy.
"We've wasted so much money on medical treatment," she said. "I think the best thing would be to give up on it."
Her rising medical bills were one reason her husband left a few years ago for construction work in a northern metropolis, Tianjin. He returns twice a year to plant or harvest crops. On good months, he sends home $60, but Ms. Kong says months go by with nothing in the mail.
Her illness shapes family life. Her elderly mother tends her husband's fields because she is too weak. Her sons wash the clothes. She grows a ragged garden in her courtyard because the pesticides coating vegetables at local markets make her sick. The plate of boiled eggs on her dresser was a gift from sympathetic relatives.
Asked about pollution, she seemed confused, as if unaware of the concept. But she has noticed that her well water smells bad and has changed in taste. She knows that others are sick, too. "There's a family next door with a case of cancer," she said. "But they don't like to talk about it. People here are scared to talk about these things."
Epidemiological research for cancer in the Huai basin is scant. None has been done in Huangmengying. Nor does any scientific evidence prove that pollution is causing the rising cancer rate. What is clear is the wide range of pollutants, from fertilizer runoff to the dumping of factory wastes.
But Dr. Zhao Meiqin, chief of radiology at the county hospital, said cancer cases in the area rose sharply after heavy industry arrived in the 1980's and 90's. Before, the area had about 10 cases a year. "Now, in a year, there are hundreds of cases," she said, putting the number as high as 400, mostly stomach and intestinal tumors. "Originally, most of the patients were in their 50's and 60's. But now it tends to strike earlier. I've even treated one patient who is only 7."
Dr. Zhao said most cancer patients came from villages close to the factories along the Shaying River, a major tributary in the Huai basin. Mr. Wang, the village party chief, also said the highest concentrations of cancer were found in the homes closest to the village stream, which draws its water directly from the Shaying.
(Continued in next post)
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