When a Billion Chinese Jump (27 page)

Many of these calamities had common causes: a belief that more people meant more power, unrealistically high expectations of the land’s fertility, and regional party lackeys who took their leader’s wildest plans to absurd extremes, lied about results, then silenced any critic who dared to reveal the truth.
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After 1978, much the same could be said of the embrace of dirty industry and reckless get-rich-quick schemes that were touted as the best way to lift Henan’s huge population out of poverty.

We drove east, through the haze, across the floodplains to one of the worst-affected areas. The Huai River basin is home to 150 million people who live among its tangle of tributaries and irrigation canals. Near Henan’s border with Anhui Province, the villages here were crushed together, along with the people. Junctions were strewn with rubbish, and wider social problems were evident from a giant billboard depicting an emaciated man and a
screaming entreaty: “Don’t use drugs!” More people migrated from these two provinces than almost anywhere else in China.
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It was the human pool that filled cities like Shanghai with cheap labor. There was little reason to stay. This area was often deluged by floods. In the postreform era, it had also become synonymous with pollution and sickness.
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During the eighties and nineties, poor but venal local governments in the Huai valley were in such a rush to industrialize that they accepted and protected heavily polluting companies, such as paper mills, tanneries, and chemical plants. It was a huge risk to the health of the population, though perhaps not fully understood at the time.

Local governments did not want to miss out on the economic development that was making other parts of China rich. Environment protection officials joined “investment soliciting delegations” to promise industries that they would not face the tight controls seen in richer areas.
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Outside companies were willing to invest, to provide jobs, and—almost certainly—bribes. Many were joint ventures with multinationals that could not get approval to site their production in countries with more stringent environmental standards. Among the worst culprits was Lianhua (Lotus) Gourmet Powder Company—a joint venture between the local government and Japan’s Ajinomoto—which was China’s biggest producer of monosodium glutamate food flavoring. Every day the plant discharged 120,000 tons of wastewater. Pollution slicks of up to 70 kilometers in length were common. The Ying, a Huai tributary lauded by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai for “crystal clear” headwaters, became a cesspool.

Almost 100 “cancer villages” have been identified in China, most of them near polluted waterways. From the mid-1990s, pioneering Chinese journalists began investigating a belt of them along the Huai River basin. Reliable information was hard to come by, locals were often intimidated, and many NGO officials and reporters were reluctant to talk on the record. Before my trip, a Chinese journalist advised me not to visit because it might put people in jeopardy. “After I published my story, my sources were constantly harassed by local public security officers. I wish I had never written the piece,” he told me.

Another journalist, Deng Fei, has mapped those affected villages.
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The scientific basis for the cancer village tag is mixed. There have been few epidemiological studies and much of the evidence is anecdotal. But at the very least, these villages can be considered clusters of fear. Such
concerns are well founded. Nationally, cancer rates rose rapidly after the launch of economic reforms, and in 1997, this disease became the main cause of death in China for the first time. It causes one in five deaths, up 80 percent over the past thirty years. Lung cancer, caused by smoking and air pollution, is the biggest killer. Diseases of the digestive system—associated with water pollution and food contamination—have also risen sharply.
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Worst affected are the 700 million people living in the countryside, who are poorer and less likely to have access to piped, treated water than urban dwellers. Compared with the global average, Chinese farmers are almost four times more likely to die of liver cancer and twice as likely to die of stomach cancer. Environmental standards are dire in many areas, but nowhere else has a worse reputation than the Huai River basin. Anecdotal or not, the locals have solid reasons to be fearful.

In the poor district of Xiangcheng City, the residents living between a coal-fired power plant and the Lianhua factory were not sure whether to worry more about the polluted air or the contaminated water they had been breathing and drinking for a large part of their lives. For much of the previous twenty years another Huai tributary, the Yun, that ran near to their homes had been choked with chemicals, while the air above, they said, had been tinted green on the smoggiest days. At the local industrial primary school, everything from windowsills to the leaves on the trees was coated in fine black dust. A cleanup was finally under way, but for many it was too late.

“The rich folk have already moved out. Just a couple of hundred families remain. It has become a slum,” said one local woman. “Among those left behind, almost everyone over the age of forty has some kind of disease … We have complained about the pollution but no one cares. Our county is too remote and too poor.”

Many residents in this sprawl of wide gray streets believed the pollution was deadly. A short distance downstream at Shi Zhuang Village, a factory worker named Shi Yingzhong was mourning the death of his father from cancer the previous year. The illness had brought financial disaster to an already poor family, which was now saddled with crippling medical bills. Shi’s share of the outstanding debt ran to about 25,000 yuan—a huge sum for a man who earned just 1,000 yuan per month. His wife received even less for her work on the family’s fields.

Shi was resigned rather than angry, but he had no doubt about the
cause of his father’s death. “It was the polluted water,” he said. “We used to drink from a well just four meters deep. Then the water became dirty so we had to go deeper and deeper. Now it is more than forty meters, but the water is still not clean.”

Yet many locals remembered a time not so long ago when the Huai was considered a blessed river. Perhaps the most famous of them is Huo Daishan, who has led the battle again pollution in Henan.

Huo smiled as he recalled nearly drowning in the Huai as a three-year-old. “There were lots of kids diving in the river and swimming around. It looked really exciting so I decided to join in. In I went, then down, down under the water thinking ‘Isn’t this fun!’ Especially after a little while when I could see a blaze of lights in my head. Only later did I realize this meant I had fallen into a coma.”

He came to love the river that nearly killed him. During his childhood in the 1950s it was a source of drinking water, irrigation for the fields, fish for the table, and, once he had properly learned to swim, fun. There was romance too. His grandmother took him to a nighttime wedding ceremony on the water. As musicians played and fireworks were set off from brightly illuminated boats, the bride was rowed in from one side and the groom—stripped down to his shorts with just a red ribbon in his hair—had to dance his way slowly across the water from the other direction, his swaying movements the only source of power for the boat. “It was extraordinarily beautiful,” recalled Huo. “Even in films, I have never seen anything like it.”

That cultural tradition disappeared. The population grew, the economy changed, and so did the river. By the mid-1980s, the banks of the Huai were punctuated with factories. In 1987, when Huo was assigned to photograph the river near his childhood home, the waters were black. It stank. Dead fish floated on the surface. The silk trader’s son lacked the vocabulary to describe what had happened. “Back then, we didn’t even know the word ‘pollution.’”

Locals expressed the change in aphorisms and songs. The people of this area are proud of their cultural heritage. When they are happy, they write ditties and wistful ballads. When sad, they do not just grumble, they sing lamentations. In the late 1950s, this literary talent was channeled into propaganda slogans for their homeland.

“Though you may walk thousands of miles, you will never find beauty
to compare to the Huai River” went one. “When we have a good harvest by the Huai River, no one in the entire country will go hungry” ran another.

Forty years later, with the river filthy and the land contaminated, the wordsmiths turned out more cynical lines:

In the fifties, we washed our food in the clear river,
In the sixties, we irrigated our fields with its waters,
In the seventies, we saw our river turn black and oily,
In the eighties, we watched dead fish float to the surface,
In the nineties, we too started to fall sick.

The government knew a catastrophe was taking place and tried to act. In 1995, the country’s first river environment protection law was enacted to clean up the Huai. The ranking State Council member for the environment, Song Jian, proclaimed boldly, “We must be ready to sever our limbs when bitten by a poisonous snake,” to show his willingness to sacrifice polluting industries. But the local government had other ideas. They were not going to abandon companies like Lianhua, which employed 8,000 people and had the host city as a majority stakeholder. The cleanup campaign proved only that laws in China are easy to ignore and rhetoric is often the opposite of reality. Lianhua continued to dump ammonium nitrate. Tanneries and chemical firms discharged other pollutants. The black slicks grew longer and fouler. At the peak, the stench grew so noxious that children at nearby schools had to wear masks in the classroom. A sharp rise in tumor cases prompted Huo—then working for the
China Environment Daily
—to coin the phrase
aizheng cun
(cancer village). Soon similar clusters of disease were being identified up and down the river. Downstream in Anhui Province, the deadly impact on health was exposed by independent journalist Chen Guidi in his article “Warning of Huai River.”

Others followed. Soon the names of the Henan cancer villages—Mengzhi, Sunying, Chenkou, Dachu, Duying, Huangmengying, Xiditou—were notorious across the country.
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Along stretches of the river, the cancer rate was more than twice the national average, but locals had no choice but to drink the stinking water. They would boil it, then skim the scum off the top, but the metallic taste never left. Huo says the calamity hit home hardest when his friend, a local village chief, was struck with cancer after
downing a liter of contaminated well water in a bid to prove to locals that he was willing to take the same risks as them.

As late as 2004, the state environmental protection agency was insisting the Huai had been cleaned up. Living by a river that was still evidently foul, locals responded with a new slogan: “We have filthy officials and filthy water. For clean water, we need clean officials.”

Huo switched from journalist to activist, exposing factories that were secretly discharging wastewater in the night, and mocking officials who spoke of a cleanup. It was a dangerous move. His family started to get death threats. One day, on his way home from taking pictures of the Lianhua factory, he was beaten up by thugs.

But the media attention was starting to pay off. In 2004, the leaders of the four worst-affected provinces along the Huai agreed to new controls for wastewater. Dozens of factories were closed. The Henan government spent 325 million yuan on drilling 700 new wells into superdeep aquifers. Even the Lianhua MSG factory had cleaned up. It was such a model that other factories were told to copy its example. When I visited the Huai several years later it was no longer black. It did not stink. Some brave souls had even resumed fishing. The subject of cancer, however, remains sensitive. In 2007, the World Bank issued a preliminary report suggesting 750,000 people die each year from pollution in China. This figure was removed from the published document at the urging of the government. It did not even include cancer deaths.
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At Mengjian Village I ducked into a courtyard house to talk to a local farming family, who described how the disease had ravaged their community. “Everyone knew someone who had cancer. But now there is a big change. It is like two different worlds. The environment is much better,” said Mr. Wang, the head of the family. He credited the government for drilling a well into a safe deep aquifer 500 meters below the surface. The old well, 30 meters deep, is still contaminated. “A frog would die if it jumped in there for even a second,” he said.

Others told a similar story. The old problem of water contamination had been replaced by a new one of water scarcity. Pressure from a growing population and expanding industry had resulted in overuse and contamination of rivers and shallow wells across northern China. The deep aquifers could only be a temporary solution. They are a nonrenewable resource, like oil. Pumped at huge cost, they led to subsidence and—if
close to the sea—intrusion by brackish water.
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This meant more stress on the land. Already under intense pressure from above, it was now being sucked dry down below.

Environmental stress was to blame for the prejudice directed toward people in Henan, according to Yan Lianke, Henan’s most famous modern wordsmith. The controversial author was the master of dark, absurdist fiction inspired by the deterioration of his homeland. Yan began his writing career as a military author employed by the People’s Liberation Army to pen morale-boosting stories for the troops. Instead, his first novel,
Xia Riluo
(1994), related the tale of two military heroes who steadily debased themselves. Yan was thrown out of the army in 2004 after publishing
Shouhuo
(
Enjoyment
), which satirized the bizarre wealth-creation schemes of many local governments. In that award-winning novel, desperate county officials in Henan were so short of resources that the only way they could think of developing their economy was to set up a freak show and buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia as an attraction for the growing “Red tourism” market. More scandalous still was Yan’s next work,
Serve the People,
which was banned altogether in China. This was not surprising given the plot, which revolved around a Cultural Revolution–era affair between an army officer’s wife and her lover, who smashed up images of Mao Zedong and urinated on his little red book to reach new heights of sexual ecstasy.