September 12, 2004
THE GREAT DIVIDE | RURAL WASTELANDS
Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer
By JIM YARDLEY
HUANGMENGYING, China - Wang Lincheng began his accounting at the brick
hut of a farmer. Dead of cancer, he said flatly, his dress shoes
sinking in the mud. Dead of cancer, he repeated, glancing at another
vacant house.
Mr. Wang, head of the Communist Party in this village, ignored a June
rain and trudged past mud-brick houses, ticking off other deaths,
other empty homes. He did not seem to notice a small cornfield where
someone had dug a burial mound of fresh red dirt.
Finally, he stopped at the door of a sickened young mother. Her home
was beside a stream turned greenish-black from dumping by nearby
factories - polluted water that had contaminated drinking wells.
Cancer had been rare when the stream was clear, but last year cancer
accounted for 13 of the 17 deaths in the village.
"All the water we drink around here is polluted," Mr. Wang said. "You
can taste it. It's acrid and bitter. Now the victims are starting to
come out, people dying of cancer and tumors and unusual causes."
The stream in Huangmengying is one tiny canal in the Huai River basin,
a vast system that has become a grossly polluted waste outlet for
thousands of factories in central China. There are 150 million people
in the Huai basin, many of them poor farmers now threatened by water
too toxic to touch, much less drink.
Pollution is pervasive in China, as anyone who has visited the
smog-choked cities can attest. On the World Bank's list of 20 cities
with the worst air, 16 are Chinese. But leaders are now starting to
clean up major cities, partly because urbanites with rising incomes
are demanding better air and water. In Beijing and Shanghai, officials
are forcing out the dirtiest polluters to prepare for the 2008
Olympics.
By contrast, the countryside, home to two-thirds of China's
population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local
officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect
factories that have polluted for years. Refineries and smelters forced
out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign
companies, to escape regulation at home.
The losers are hundreds of millions of peasants already at the bottom
of a society now sharply divided between rich and poor. They are
farmers and fishermen who depend on land and water for their basic
existence.
In July and August, officials measured an 82-mile band of polluted
water moving through the Huai basin. China rates its waterways on a
scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being too toxic even to touch. This water was
rated 5. For fishermen, it may as well have been poison. "If I had
wanted to, I could have gone on the river and filled a boat with dead
fish," said Song Dexi, 64, a fisherman in Yumin. "It was smelly, like
toilet water. All our fish and shrimp died. We don't have anything to
live on now."
The Huai was supposed to be a Communist Party success story. Ten years
ago, the central government vowed to clean up the basin after a
pollution tide killed fish and sickened thousands of people. Three
years ago, a top Chinese official called the cleanup a success. But
the Huai is now a symbol of the failure of environmental regulation in
China. The central government promotes big solutions but gives
regulators little power to enforce them. Local officials have few
incentives to crack down on polluters because their promotion system
is based primarily on economic growth, not public health.
It is a game that leaves poorer, rural regions clinging to the worst polluters.
"No doubt there is an economic food chain, and the lower you are, the
worse off your environmental problems are likely to be," said
Elizabeth C. Economy, author of "The River Runs Black" (Cornell
University Press, 2004), a study of China's environment. "One city
after the next is offloading its polluting industries outside its city
limits, and polluting industries themselves are seeking poorer areas."
China is facing an ecological and health crisis. Heavy air pollution
contributes to respiratory illnesses that kill up to 300,000 people a
year, many in cities but also in rural areas, the World Bank
estimates. Liver and stomach cancer, linked in some studies to water
pollution, are among the leading causes of death in the countryside.
"Over the past 20 years in China, there has been a single-minded focus
on economic growth with the belief that economic growth can solve all
problems," said Pan Yue, the outspoken deputy director of China's
State Environmental Protection Administration. "But this has left
environmental protection badly behind."
Too Poor to Flee, or to Get Well
Few places bear that out more than eastern Henan Province, which
includes Huangmengying. The isolated region has tanneries, paper mills
and other high-polluting industries dumping directly into the rivers.
One of the biggest polluters is the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company,
China's largest producer of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the flavor
enhancer. But the company's political influence is so vast that
environmental regulators who have tried to challenge the company have
done so in vain.
The Huai River basin has neither the history of the Yellow River nor
the mystique of the Yangtze. Yet the Huai, with its spider's web of
canals and broad tributaries, irrigates a huge swath of China's
agricultural heartland.
Farmers once spent lifetimes tilling the same plot of corn or wheat.
But in the past decade, millions of farmers, unable to earn a living
from the land, have left Henan for migrant work in cities, leaving
behind villages of old people and young mothers.
One of those mothers is Kong Heqin, 30, who was the last stop on Mr.
Wang's cancer tour in June. She stumbled into her dirt courtyard,
disheveled and groggy from an afternoon nap. Her face was bloated and
her legs were swollen. She had already had three operations for
cancer, and new tumors were growing in her large intestine.
Earlier in the year, doctors had prescribed chemotherapy. But
treatments cost $500 a series, nearly a year's income. She had
borrowed $250 to pay spring school fees for her two sons, and she
worried that chemotherapy would drain the family's meager resources
away from her children.
So she stopped chemotherapy.
"We've wasted so much money on medical treatment," she said. "I think
the best thing would be to give up on it."
Her rising medical bills were one reason her husband left a few years
ago for construction work in a northern metropolis, Tianjin. He
returns twice a year to plant or harvest crops. On good months, he
sends home $60, but Ms. Kong says months go by with nothing in the
mail.
Her illness shapes family life. Her elderly mother tends her husband's
fields because she is too weak. Her sons wash the clothes. She grows a
ragged garden in her courtyard because the pesticides coating
vegetables at local markets make her sick. The plate of boiled eggs on
her dresser was a gift from sympathetic relatives.
Asked about pollution, she seemed confused, as if unaware of the
concept. But she has noticed that her well water smells bad and has
changed in taste. She knows that others are sick, too. "There's a
family next door with a case of cancer," she said. "But they don't
like to talk about it. People here are scared to talk about these
things."
Epidemiological research for cancer in the Huai basin is scant. None
has been done in Huangmengying. Nor does any scientific evidence prove
that pollution is causing the rising cancer rate. What is clear is the
wide range of pollutants, from fertilizer runoff to the dumping of
factory wastes.
But Dr. Zhao Meiqin, chief of radiology at the county hospital, said
cancer cases in the area rose sharply after heavy industry arrived in
the 1980's and 90's. Before, the area had about 10 cases a year. "Now,
in a year, there are hundreds of cases," she said, putting the number
as high as 400, mostly stomach and intestinal tumors. "Originally,
most of the patients were in their 50's and 60's. But now it tends to
strike earlier. I've even treated one patient who is only 7."
Dr. Zhao said most cancer patients came from villages close to the
factories along the Shaying River, a major tributary in the Huai
basin. Mr. Wang, the village party chief, also said the highest
concentrations of cancer were found in the homes closest to the
village stream, which draws its water directly from the Shaying.
Polluters Hiding in Plain Sight
Health problems began appearing slowly in the early 1990's. Mr. Wang
said he learned that the water was severely polluted after an
environmental official came on a personal visit. Farmers also began
complaining that their fields were producing less grain because of
polluted irrigation water.
Today, pollution corrodes daily life here. Farmers too poor to buy
bottled water instead drink well water that curdles with scum when it
is boiled.
Xiao Junhai is 57 but looks two decades older. In June, he shivered
under a quilt in a dark room, summer flies flitting at his head,
cancer knotting his stomach. He could not lift himself from his crude
bed.
"I grew up drinking the water here, and I still drink it," he said. "I
don't know what pollution is, but I do know it means the water is
bad."
His daughter, Xiao Li, 24, anguished over the dilemma that her
father's illness had thrust upon her. She says her father takes
traditional Chinese remedies and eats rice porridge because the family
cannot afford treatment. If she returned to her migrant job on the
coast, in Hangzhou, she might earn enough money to pay for it. But no
one else can care for him. So she has stayed.
"The water in the river used to be clean, but now it's black and
changing colors all the time," she said. "The water is being
destroyed."
The Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company is based in Xiangcheng, upstream
from Huangmengying. It is the area's largest employer, with more than
8,000 workers, and the largest taxpayer in Xiangcheng.
For Henan Province, Lianhua Gourmet is a signature company, the
biggest producer of MSG in China. An analysis by a Chinese credit
rating service, Xinhua Far East, found that in 2001 the factory
produced more than 133,000 tons of MSG and has plans to raise
production to 200,000 tons.
Under any circumstances, the company's sheer size would translate into
significant political clout. But Lianhua, basically, is the
government. Lianhua is traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but
according to the credit analysis, its majority stockholder is a
holding company owned by the Xiangcheng city government.
This type of government-controlled enterprise is not unusual in China,
but the potential for a conflict of interest is glaring. The
production of MSG leaves potentially harmful byproducts, including
ammonia nitrate and other pollutants that are supposed to be treated
to meet environmental standards.
A damning report last year by the State Environmental Protection
Administration blamed local officials for lax enforcement. The report
said Lianhua had dumped 124,000 tons of untreated water every day
through secret channels connected to the Xiangcheng city sewage
system. The water eventually flowed into the Shaying River, almost
quadrupling pollution levels.
"This constitutes a grave threat to the lives and livelihoods of
people downstream," the report stated.
Officials at Lianhua did not respond to repeated written and telephone
requests for interviews. Neither did officials in Xiangcheng nor with
Henan Province.
But one retired local Communist Party official said party cadres had
always protected Lianhua. He said a son-in-law of a Lianhua chief
executive once even headed the city's environmental protection bureau.
"There are a lot of officials who don't care about pollution," said
the official, who asked not to be identified. "Some leaders are just
interested in making money."
He said the company often broke promises about cleaning up. "What they
said and what they did were different things," he said. "They even
said they would stop production if they weren't able to meet pollution
standards. But they never did that."
A Stream of Black Water
This June, a reporter saw a noxious liquid flowing from a waste outlet
into a stream near a Lianhua factory on the outskirts of Xiangcheng. A
sign above the outlet said, "Lianhua Company, No. 3 Waste Outlet.''
Another sign said the outlet was under the oversight of the city
environmental bureau. The acrid smell was so strong that it was
difficult to stand nearby.
Less than a mile downstream from the waste outlet, Wang Haiqing
watched his seven goats chew on weeds. Mr. Wang lived on the other
side of the stream, in Wangguo, and said several neighbors had
contracted cancer or other intestinal ailments. He said his goats
vomited if they drank from the blackened water.
To reach clean drinking water, he said villagers must dig wells 130
feet deep. Most cannot afford to do so.
"It's been so polluted by the MSG factory," said Mr. Wang, 60. "It
tastes metallic even after you boil it and skim the stuff off it. But
it's the only water we have to drink and to use for cooking."
The rains of June in Huangmengying had given way to boiling humidity
by the middle of August. Mr. Wang, the village chief, wore shorts and
sandals as he again walked beside the village stream. He said four
more people had died since June, two of cancer.
But much had also changed in the two months.
The 10th anniversary of the government's promise to clean up the Huai
had become a major embarrassment for the Communist Party. Roughly $8
billion had been spent to improve the basin, but the State
Environmental Protection Administration concluded this year that some
areas were more polluted than before.
China's press, often given freer rein on environmental issues,
published critical articles over the summer. The newspaper operated by
the State Environmental Protection Administration blamed local
officials for allowing powerful companies, including Lianhua, to
continue polluting. Even tiny Huangmengying got attention: a crew from
state television visited in July. Officials, fearing a humiliating
exposé, hurriedly started digging a deeper well for the village.
But the gesture was dwarfed by what Henan officials did for Lianhua.
For more than a year, the company had been in financial trouble,
suffering from bad investments and a slowdown in the MSG market. For
months, banks pressured it for roughly $217 million in unpaid loans.
The Henan Province government stepped into the breach. The Henan
governor, Li Chengyu, organized a meeting at Lianhua headquarters in
July to devise a plan to save the company. The Henan government also
gave the company more than $25 million.
"The government is confident and the business is confident that
Lianhua Gourmet can be brought around," Mr. Li said, according to the
Chinese financial press. "The banks should support Lianhua Gourmet."
The signal was clear. Henan's government would make certain Lianhua survived.
In Huangmengying, Mr. Wang again visited Ms. Kong, the young mother
with cancer, who was also struggling to survive. Her resolve in June
to forego chemotherapy had withered with her health by August. She was
pale and coughing as she explained that she had again borrowed money
for more treatment. She would leave in a few days.
But it meant that she could not pay her sons' school fees for the fall
semester. Her husband could not find work and had no money to send.
And the friends who had loaned her money said they could loan her no
more. "I'm scared," she said.
Only an hour earlier, Mr. Wang had been walking to visit Ms. Kong when
a woman rushed toward him and knelt in a formal kowtow, touching her
lips against the dirt. Her husband had dropped dead. Doctors had
examined the body and discovered a tumor. She needed Mr. Wang to help
with funeral arrangements. He asked where she and her husband lived.
In a small brick hut, about 50 yards from the village stream, answered
the woman, Liu Sumei.
Ms. Liu, 50, led Mr. Wang to a friend's home, where her husband's body
lay in a coffin under a large poster of Mao Zedong.
Ms. Liu had not known her husband had cancer, only that he was in poor
health. But in Huangmengying, she said, poor health is not unusual.
"Every family has someone who is sick," she said. "All the neighbors."
Chris Buckley contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/international/asia/12china.html
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