About this article<\/p>
This is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by China Dialogue and Yale Environment 360<\/a>, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Zhang\u2019s uncle lived in Fenshui, in Central China\u2019s Jiangsu province, a village of some 7,000 people that straddles a network of waterways on the western shore of Lake Tai, China\u2019s third largest freshwater lake. Lake Tai boasts 800 square miles of fresh water, shared between Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, and has been celebrated throughout Chinese history for its abundant fish and beautiful limestone landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as China\u2019s industrial boom gathered speed through the 1990s and the early years of the 21st<\/sup> century, a new, metalled road connected the once sleepy village of Fenshui to the major highway networks being built across China. Factories began to cluster along the lakeshore and the village\u2019s traditional single-storey whitewashed houses, with their signature black-tiled roofs, were steadily replaced with two- and even three-storey houses, as factory wages brought a surge of prosperity to Fenshui. Zhang\u2019s uncle, like many of his neighbours, had found work in one of those factories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n His illness hit the small family hard. His only son was serving in the army when his father fell ill, and the soldier\u2019s wage was too small to cover the medical bills. Zhang\u2019s aunt took a factory job herself to support her sick husband, making the difficult choice to leave him unattended during her working day. The cancer was to consume the family\u2019s savings entirely, all spent in a fruitless effort to save his life. The patient struggled through his final days at home, getting up to see to his own needs until the day he finally collapsed while fetching a drink of water. He died later that day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Zhang Junwei (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) believes that the cancer that ended his uncle\u2019s life was caused by soil pollution, a subject so sensitive in China that Zhang himself is still afraid to discuss it openly. Zhang has just turned 40 and, like his uncle, has lived all his life in Jiangsu, near the lake. His village of Zhoutie is just five miles from Fenshui and less than 40 miles from the county town of Yixing, in the heart of the Yangtze Delta, today China\u2019s biggest regional economy. For more than 1,000 years, Yixing and its surrounding countryside was an important source of grain for China, celebrated in poetry as far back as 960 AD for its benign climate and fertile soil, and famous for the manufacture of a dense, brown pottery that is still highly prized in China as the ideal material for teapots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But today Yixing and the land around it sit in China\u2019s new industrial landscape. Since the 1990s, nearly 3,000 factories have been built on the once-beautiful shores of the lake. The chemical boom made Yixing one of China\u2019s richest county-level towns, with a GDP that reached 106.6 billion yuan (US$17.06 billion) in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is also still an agricultural area: the road from Fenshui to Zhoutie runs between flat, regular fields of vegetables, these days more profitable crops than grain for farmers who live close to urban markets. But many local farmers have given up eating the crops they grow. They know that their vegetables are planted in soil polluted with cadmium, lead and mercury, heavy metals that are dangerous to human health. Zhang confessed that he rarely eats local produce either. \u201cThere\u2019s too much soil pollution,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soil pollution has received relatively little public attention in China. Despite the fact that it poses as big a threat to health as the more widely covered air and water pollution, data on soil pollution has been so closely guarded that it has been officially categorised as a \u201cstate secret\u201d. Until recently the Chinese government also resisted media efforts to draw attention to local cancer epidemics in China\u2019s newly industrial areas. It was not until February 2013 that the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) finally admitted that \u201ccancer villages\u201d existed in China, and released a list that included the area around Lake Tai and the villages of Fenshui and Zhoutie. Some civil society experts have estimated that there are 450 cancer villages in China, and believe the phenomenon is spreading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The story of the cancer hotspot of Yixing is characteristic: in the rush to develop that engulfed China from the 1990s, local officials were eager to invite factories and chemical plants into the area, and their already weak environmental controls were often disregarded entirely. \u201cGovernment officials just care about GDP,\u201d Zhang complained. \u201cThey were happy to welcome any polluting firm.\u201d So, for a time, were the villagers who found jobs in the new factories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first real signs of the troubles to come were in Lake Tai itself, and were the subject of a long campaign by another resident of Yixing township, the fisherman turned environmentalist Wu Lihong. In the early 1990s, Wu grew worried about the deterioration of Lake Tai\u2019s once famously pure waters. He organised a local environmental monitoring group that he called Defenders of Tai Lake, to collect water samples from the lake and its feeder rivers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For 16 years, Wu campaigned to draw attention to the lake\u2019s declining health, despite harassment from local officials and police and, by appealing to senior government officials, he succeeded in forcing more than 200 factories to close. But his campaign abruptly ended on April 13, 2007, when he was arrested and later sentenced to a three-year prison term on charges of extortion and blackmail. The following month, the Ministry of Environmental Protection named Yixing a \u201cNational Model City for Environmental Protection\u201d. Five days later, a toxic algae bloom turned the waters of Lake Tai into foul-smelling green sludge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That episode, in the high summer of 2007, attracted international attention and was a major embarrassment for the national as well as the provincial government. According to the Lake Tai Basin Authority, more than 30 million people draw their drinking water from the basin\u2019s 53 water sources. A Zhoutie local official admitted to the government newspaper People\u2019s Daily <\/em>that the algae bloom had caused a \u201cwater supply crisis\u201d, and said the lake\u2019s water \u201clooked like soy sauce\u201d. The authorities finally acted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of 2006, Yixing had been home to 1,188 firms producing chemicals. By October 2013, after six years of \u201crectification\u201d, 583 had been closed down, merged or reopened as other types of business, as were 104 chemical plants in Zhoutie and 57 in neighbouring Taihua township. In late 2013, Yixing started a new round of chemical industry clean-up, with plans to deal with an additional 52 chemical firms over the next two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It all came too late for the campaigner Wu Lihong: he has now completed his prison term and his wife and daughter have moved overseas, but Wu himself remains subject to restrictions, including a ban on talking to the media. His harsh treatment is a reminder to other villagers that environmental activism carries a high cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pollution remains a highly sensitive subject in the district. Most interviewees were too frightened to give their names, worried about how local officials might react. Others complained that official secrecy about pollution meant that they could not discover what dangers Zhoutie\u2019s toxic legacy might pose to their own health and that of their families. Zhang Junwei recalled that, when the pollution was at its worst, even people\u2019s sweat was discoloured. \u201cSeveral of my relatives died from cancer very young,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the local government has now closed the worst of the factories, the pollutants those factories had released in their wastewater or sludge ended up in the soil, and the toxic waste from those polluting years continues to threaten the health of the people of the area and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zhang Junwei and villagers like him are well aware that cancer rates in their district have risen, and they suspect that pollution is the cause. They say the number of cancer victims started to increase 10 years ago, when local farmers began to fall ill and die. Their suspicions were well-founded: when crops are grown in soil contaminated with cadmium or other heavy metals, the grain absorbs the toxins. But even today, despite this awareness of what pollution can do, local farmers have little choice but to continue to plant: these are families that reaped no direct benefit from industrialisation and still have few alternative sources of income. The poorest still eat locally produced food, knowing it is contaminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Establishing a clear connection, however, between pollution and cancer is scientifically challenging. At Hohai University, in Jiangsu Province, Chen Ajiang, a sociologist who heads the university\u2019s Institute of the Environment and Sociology, admitted that the link between pollution and cancer is extremely complex, and it is difficult to pin down cause and effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2007, professor Chen won a government grant to study the interaction of human and water environments in the basins of Lake Tai and the Huai River. For five years, he and his four researchers carried out field studies in the provinces of Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Guangdong, looking for evidence of the health impacts of water pollution. Professor Chen believed that pollution-related illness was damaging economic development, keeping villagers in poverty or driving them away from their native villages altogether. Although he admits that the medical world has not yet identified an undisputed link between pollution and cancer in the villages he studied, his team established beyond doubt that cancer villages exist and that the lives of those who live in them are severely impacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pollution that chemical factories released in gas and sludge, and in the wastewater they discharged into Lake Tai and other local waterways, has now accumulated in the surrounding soil, but the government has been reluctant to acknowledge the scale of the problem: in April, 2013, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development awarded Zhoutie a \u201cHabitat Environment Prize\u201d, an award, like the accolade given to Xining, that seems out of tune with the real state of Zhoutie\u2019s environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In April 2013, the Jiangsu Geological Survey published part of a report that showed that heavy metal pollution in the Wuxi, Suzhou and Changzhou areas has increased continuously since 2004, with once isolated spots of pollution from cadmium and mercury now expanding and merging to form larger, continuous areas. The report, New technologies for monitoring and preventing heavy metal pollution resulting from urbanization, <\/em>revealed that between 2005 and 2011 increasing levels of cadmium were found at 37.5% of the sites sampled, with average increases of 0.03 milligrams (mg) of cadmium per kilogram (kg) of soil. At its highest, the annual average increase was 0.2 mg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continuous monitoring revealed an escalating pattern of pollution: in one unspecified area, researchers reported, cadmium levels higher than 0.4 mg per kg of soil were found only in relatively isolated patches in the land surrounding industrial development. But by 2012, large stretches of nearby farmland were polluted to the same levels, and rice and wheat produced in the area were contaminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also described one case — later identified as the township of Dingshu, 18 miles to the southwest of Zhoutie — where, due to a cluster of township enterprises that were dumping their waste, cadmium levels in the river silt had reached 1500 mg per kg, and that rice produced on nearby land was contaminated with cadmium to levels of more than 0.5 mg per kg. China\u2019s food safety standards rule that rice can contain no more than 0.2 mg per kg of cadmium, and the international limit is 0.4 mg per kg. Rice from Dingshu has long been in breach of those limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dingshu is the centre of Yixing\u2019s ceramics industry, home to many glazed tile factories, teapot factories and clay workshops. Yixing\u2019s stoneware is an important source of revenue, but the factories have also badly damaged the local environment and contribute to the area\u2019s soil pollution. Yixing launched a crackdown on ceramic factories in early 2011, but by June 2013 only 300 had been fully shut down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The area\u2019s problems illustrate the high price China is paying for 30 years of rapid economic development and the risks China\u2019s increasingly serious soil pollution poses to its food. Official estimates say that China produces 12 million tonnes of heavy-metal contaminated grain a year, with an economic cost of more than 20 billion yuan (US$3.2 billion).<\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s official approach to soil pollution has been characterised by secrecy and obfuscation. Even now, a picture of the scale and severity of the problem must be pieced together from disparate reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2010, for instance, a report on soil protection policy from the international expert body, the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), warned that overall trends in China\u2019s soil pollution gave no cause for optimism. Quoting China\u2019s official 1997 Report on the State of the Environment in China, it characterised the pollution of China’s arable land as \u201crather severe\u201d, with pollution affecting an estimated 10 million hectares of land. By the year 2000, according to that year\u2019s report on the state of the environment, 36,000 of the 300,000 hectares of basic farmland monitored for harmful heavy metals were found to be more than 12% beyond the standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CCICED\u2019s researchers were no more optimistic about China\u2019s system of supervision and management of soil, finding that investment in soil pollution prevention and control was too low. They stressed that soil pollution reduces the quality of crops and recommended legislation to protect the soil and to control pollution, as well as improvement in China\u2019s environmental soil standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are now signs that the gravity of the soil pollution problem is belatedly forcing the Chinese government to begin to deal with a problem that has accumulated over many decades, and to reconsider its policy of pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment. In July 2007, the Ministry of Land and the National Bureau of Statistics launched a nationwide soil survey. It was completed in 2009, but partial results were not published until December 2013. In April 2014, the government released partial results of a second soil pollution survey, conducted from April 2005 to December 2013, and covering 630 square kilometres (243 square miles) of farmland. The survey reported that about 16.1% of China’s soil and about 19.4% of farmland were contaminated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n China has 135 million hectares of arable land in total, but the amount of available high quality arable land has been dropping due to advancing urbanisation and pollution. According to the recently released data, the government classifies more than 3 million hectares of arable land as moderately polluted. How much of that is contaminated with heavy metals is still not clear, though in 2011, Wang Bentai, then chief engineer of the State Environmental Protection Agency (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) said that 10% of China\u2019s arable land is polluted with lead, zinc and other heavy metals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rising public concern about the impacts of pollution have begun to force a change in government attitudes, but changes at the top can take some time to percolate down to lower levels of government. In November 2013, delegates to the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee \u2013 an important party meeting \u2013 adopted a key strategy document that set out the government\u2019s priorities for the immediate future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The document, prosaically entitled Decision on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reforms,<\/em> promised that environmental protection would be given more importance in the performance evaluation of local and national officials, and that local officials would be considered directly responsible for pollution. Economic growth would no longer guarantee promotion for local officials. The government also promises to put in place the legislation and powers to allow polluters to be heavily punished, a promise that began to take shape in the new environmental protection law, approved in April 2014, which removed the caps that had kept fines for polluters low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, Zhuang Guotai, the head of the MEP\u2019s Department of Nature and Ecology Conservation, has said that cleaning up soil pollution is a difficult and lengthy process that will require huge investment. In some cases, he explained, the pollution the ministry had identified in soil samples could be traced back decades: pollution from the pesticide benzene hexachloride, for instance, a substance banned in the 1980s, was still in evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr Zhuang promised that an action plan to deal with soil pollution will pull together both central and local government and businesses, using market mechanisms to promote soil restoration, with rewards systems in place to encourage public participation. A new law on soil pollution is also promised. But soil remediation is expensive and complex, and there are no easy answers to a pollution nightmare that has brought early death to the afflicted villages, reduced harvests and rendered much of China\u2019s home-grown food toxic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rapid industrialisation has left a legacy of soil pollution that is damaging health and livelihoods in villages across China<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1727,"featured_media":57319,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[514,551,587],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-32073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pollution","tag-chemicals","tag-health","tag-rivers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/map1.jpg\")
<\/div>A ‘state secret’<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/unnamed-file.jpg\")
<\/div>Linking pollution and illness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/3.jpg\")
<\/div>A lack of transparency<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/unnamed-file-1.jpg\")
<\/div>Starting to clean up?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n