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Farmer Bai Wu Fen

In China, a river is a mighty thing.

It signifies a land of abundance; of fish and rice.

The river system is like a cradle,

nourishing and sustaining the staple

that feeds more hungry mouths than

anywhere else on earth.

But something is happening turning this lifeblood to poison.

The Huai River basin is home to more than one-tenth of China’s population and yet the river is dying by the minute.

Each year, more than 7 million tons of untreated effluent from industry pours into the water creating a heady chemical cocktail rendering much of the river useless.

Old farmer Bai grows beans by the

riverside to earn a little extra cash. The

crop feeds his family and he sells what

they don’t eat. But lately, there hasn’t

been much left over… and what excess there is, isn’t worth selling.

Look at what happened to my plants. No-one told me the water was poisonous – some have died. Look at this one, that one, a dead one here; all dead. The water is poisonous, yes, poisonous.

China’s Central Government has made the Huai River’s clean up a test case.

Xie Zhenhua

Environmental Protection Agency

Prof. Pan Tiansheng

Local E.P.A.

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Factory Man

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Mr. Wang

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Fisherman

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Factory Man

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Well Lady

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Restaurant Man

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Restaurant Man

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Woman

It wants to raise more than a billion dollars to flush out the black water for good.

The challenge is a clean river by the year 2000… a goal the government wants to achieve at all costs.

We’re now urging the National People’s Congress to make it an offence to damage the environment.

If the environment is jeopardised, those responsible will

be charged according to the law.

But while the Central government is keen to clean up the river, the local governments, for too long, were only interested in economic development.

Here, the dead water serves its only useful purposed; keeping afloat the barges which ferry the raw materials for new roads, because roads equal infrastructure equals investment.

Townships have put their weight behind local industry, an attempt to

keep the labour force from drifting to the richer coastal provinces.

For every kilometer of the Huai River, there is at least one factory and it’s more than likely to produce pulp.

The process devours a mountain of straw, more resilient and harmful to the river than wood-pulp. It’s washed by a toxic, chemical mixture that penetrates the food chain.

Though some factories now employ filtration techniques, the bulk of the effluent is unadulterated poison… a situation made worse by the proliferation of riverside household

mills all keen to generate extra cash.

We are shown to one of the biggest paper factory’s in the Province.

A factory gradually changing its methods, because it’s big enough to

withstand the cost of pollution controls.

The central government is going to raise funds from society or from foreign governments to expand the pulp production of the big mills. Then it’ll close the small mills. They can then buy pulp from the big factories, to reduce board or paper boxes. It will prevent pollution and promote economic development.

It’s a local government or township enterprise employing more than four thousand workers, rolling out 35

thousand tons of paper a year for China’s every-hungry printing, writing and wrapping needs.

But even this model factory is spewing out tons of polluted effluent and I want to see where it flows into the river.

We’re taken ten minutes down the road, to a holding dam next to a power station.

What do you want to look at?

The exercise is fruitless.

This is the pulp factory’s only outfall into the river, we are told.

This is the only channel. No-where else.

No, no. Look that’s the main channel. It comes down to here. No other small channels.

But as the locals showed us, there is another route leading to the river, poisonous to the eye and smelling like chemical flatulence.

It’s a scene our accompanying local officials didn’t want us to see, nor did they have the slightest intention of guiding us here.

Later that night we spoke to Mr. Wang who lives less than one hundred metres from the outfall in his house-boat on the river.

He calls himself a fisherman, but he hasn’t caught a fish in ten years.

Before, if you dropped this in the river, left it in for one day and one night, you could catch at least 5 kilos of fish. Now you put it in the river, forget half a kilo, you might be able to catch one fish.

He uses blocks of an aluminum compound to purify the water he’s just scooped from the river.

The effluent sinks to the bottom of the bucket… making it just clean enough for the house-boat chores.

But there’s no such quick-fix to bring back the fish, this families livelihood for generations.

The Huai river is only so wide and the population it supports is big. All sorts of water is dumped into it. It’s become a big cess pit.

Everything is dumped into it.

Because of this, the fish can’t survive. To be a fisherman, you are destined to be unemployed.

Our factory is a big tax-payer. The area relies on us here. In our factory, if you add the workers and their families, we support nearly twenty thousand people. If we shut down, they would have a lot of problems.

But the pollution, like the labour-force it sustains, also has implications for societies like Bengbu, a city by the river, home to 700 thousand people.

Each day it draws more than three hundred thousand tons of water from the river, the city’s main water supply, a resource very few have any faith in.

For many of Bengbu’s residents, finding water is a regular past-time.

If I drink the water, my stomach feels unwell.

Right now, the water isn’t too bad. You haven’t seen it when the polluted water comes rushing in. Then the river looks black and bubbly.

This is what the water looks near the city pier. Local officials denied us permission to film this, and our request to interview families living on the river was also turned down. We were forced to find other ways to discover what effect this overwhelming pollution was having on those whose lives depend on the river.

The local government admitted the pollution was very serious and would be controlled within a year. But how many people are digging wells! They say on television that the water has improved. Such unreliable words!

Yuan Shao Ting runs a small restaurant in what doubles as his home.

He calms the concerns of his customers by washing all his vegetables twice; once in tap water drawn from the river, a final rinse in mineral water he buys off the street.

It’s not good to care only for making money. I want to make money, but I also want to care for my customers’ health.

The residents of Bengbu aren’t alone in their concerns. All over this vast land, the national goal to be a developed country has left tens of millions of people living off polluted water.

In a country where achieving targets is often a game in itself, the message from the riverside is as forceful as the colour of the water.

Yes, I do worry. But I don’t worry about myself. I’m old. I’m seventy already. But the next generation, boys and girls, they need to grow- need to survive. They are also expected to achieve things in the future. It’s a major issue that will affect generations to come. It’s an issue affecting mankind.

The poisoning of China’s rivers by unfettered development has now been recognised by Beijing.

Eventually, the river will come back to life. But given the scale of the task it’s likely more than government slogans promising a clean river in a matter of years.

We don’t know. Go ask the leaders.

The river couldn’t be cleaned up in four years. That’s the truth. What’s the point in saying such false things. In my view, it would be impossible to clean up the river even in ten years.

One day, the Huai River might come back to life but it could take generations. It will also take a new resolve to accept that a river doesn’t exist for the sake of development, but as a bequest that sustains a land and its people.