China's Water Woes—Page 5

Yes, she could. In 2001 Yun set up Green Han River, Xiangfan's first and only environmental NGO. The group's budget is less than a thousand dollars a year but its impact has been significant. Yun's members do what officials in Beijing can't: they regularly "walk" the rivers in their region, marching along them with flags and sleeping in tents near their banks. In addition to photographing the waterways—the Tangbai has been so badly polluted by effluent from paper mills that it has literally run black—Yun and her volunteers organize classes for schoolchildren, peasants and even government officials. Sometimes she just reminds people of what ought to be obvious: "We don't live in a desert. We're right next to a river. We ought to be able to use it."

Most people may call Yun "Granny," but she is as much an activist as a teacher. In 2003 she gathered several dozen bottled samples of polluted water, lined them up on the steps of the municipal water bureau, and told her story to other environmentalists around the country. Last year, her urgings prompted a national-level inspection of Zhaiwan, a village on the Tangbai north of downtown Xiangfan, and just south of the border with Henan province. The inspection confirmed that Zhaiwan's wells contained dangerous levels of highly carcinogenic chemicals. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reported the findings, factories upstream were shut down and, early this year, Xiangfan dug the village a new deep well to supply clean drinking water. "People like Yun Jianli are the drivers of positive change in China," says Alex Wang, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. NGO. "All countries that have dealt with their environmental problems to any degree have people like Yun—passionate, on-the-ground voices who will keep on working until things change for the better."

Sadly, Zhaiwan's fate also speaks to the limitations of groups like Yun's in modern China. Despite Beijing's attention, the Tangbai still stinks. According to Zhaiwan's Mayor, Zhai Jinghan, discharges of pollution regularly turn the water black, but his complaints upriver go unheeded "because the polluting factories are on the other side of the provincial border and we're not in their domain." Xiangfan's government shares his frustration. Wang Lei of the city's Environmental Protection Bureau says Xiangfan has worked hard to clean up its portion of the river. But it has no authority to enforce antipollution measures upstream. Although levels of several key contaminants have recently declined, he says, "There is still pollution coming from industry and household waste in Henan ... We have reported and appealed to Henan many times."

But the river is still far from clean. On Sept. 7, two to three hundred people with fish nets and baskets gathered at a bridge along the Bai, a feeder of the Tangbai, in Henan's Xinye county. Stripping to their underwear, they waded in, skimming off the dead and dying fish floating by in water that gave off an odor both acrid and sweet, like a mixture of tar and caramel. No one seemed surprised at the size of the fish kill. "It happens once a month," said Gua, 51. "The factories upstream discharge their wastewater. It makes the fish get dizzy or die. That's when we come fishing." (Officials in Xinye later said in a fax that the villagers' claims were "groundless ... all the dead fish you saw could have been the result of someone illegally poisoning the fish or bombing them or electrocuting them.") Yun stood on the bridge, and called officials in Xiangfan to warn them what was heading downstream. Then she told the people around her not to eat the fish. After about 10 minutes, she propped her chin in her hands and stared out into the rain. "This," she said, "is the tragedy of our rivers."

No one wants the story to end in a place like that bridge. And indeed, Beijing has seemed to feel a sense of urgency lately. Last month, Chinese officials announced they would invest $41 billion in sewage treatment and drinking-water purification, and set an ambitious goal: clean drinking water for the entire country by 2015. Whether the initiative will really penetrate China's smaller cities and townships remains to be seen. Many Chinese cities have sewage-treatment plants but lack the funds or the will to actually operate them. Cleaning up the water above all will require a cleanup of local corruption. In March China's National Audit Office announced that as much as 70% of funds allocated for water programs between 2002 and 2003 had been misused.

Still, not all is gloom. China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), long considered a toothless watchdog, recently announced plans to establish regional offices, which will nearly double its tiny workforce, now fewer than 200. Cautiously, Beijing has floated the idea of raising water prices. Ma Jun recently launched a website that gathers together, on a searchable map, all of the available official information about pollution of China's waterways. The map will give people like Yun a new source of hard data with which to bolster their calls for a cleanup. "SEPA can't be here every day to monitor these factories," she says, "To save a river you have to rely on the people along its banks." She's trying; so are thousands like her, all over Asia.

With reporting by Nicole Qu/Beijing

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