Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Another journalist, Deng Fei, has mapped those affected villages. 24The 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. 25Worst 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. 26Along 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.”