Translation by Three Gorges Probe.

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When talking about water pollution, people in China tend to focus on the Huai and Hai rivers in the north, or Tai and Dian lakes in the south. The Yangtze, for the Chinese, means sweet milk, an inexhaustible source of water and, more importantly, the ultimate solution to China’s water crisis.¹

However, what the Chinese people don’t know is that the Yangtze is suffering from an early stage of cancer, as the Economic Reference Daily (Jingji cankao bao) reported on May 29. And without urgent intervention, the Yangtze’s condition is likely to worsen.

One of the biggest threats facing the river is the growing discharge of wastewater into the Yangtze basin. According to the Yangtze Valley Water Bulletin, as much as 28.8 billion tonnes of industrial wastewater and domestic sewage went directly into the river untreated in 2004, about 41 per cent of all such discharges into China’s rivers. That figure represents a sharp increase of 6.8 billion tonnes over 2001. Polluted river sections near major cities along the main channel together amounted to a 600-kilometre-long floating belt of pollution in 2004 (a 5-per-cent increase over the previous year), while various horrible pollution incidents also occurred on Yangtze tributaries.

But many people don’t take the problem seriously, believing that the river, with its huge flow of water (as much as 1,000 billion cubic metres a year), also has an enormous capacity for self-cleansing. As a result of such thinking, provinces and municipalities such as Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Jiangsu and Shanghai have drawn up plans to develop chemical industries along the river. As many as 40 chemical industrial zones are in the works in Jiangsu province alone.

The dense concentration of heavily polluting industries in the basin increases the risks of environmental pollution. At the same time, cities along the Yangtze handle sewage in the traditional way, by dumping it directly into the river and its tributaries. Statistics show that in 2004, only 10 per cent of the sewage poured into the Yangtze and its tributaries was treated. Wastewater discharged untreated into the river poses a direct threat to residents’ health because intake pipes for drinking water and sewer outlets are not all that far apart, having been installed in an alternating pattern near cities in the valley.

Another threat to the river stems from the overdevelopment of hydropower in the valley. Dams built on the tributaries, in particular, have brought benefits such as power generation and flood control, but at the same time have had negative environmental impacts. The dam-building has created reservoirs with slower-flowing water, which tends to reduce the “environmental capacity” of the river. Water quality in both the Yangtze mainstream and tributaries is deteriorating because of the dual pressure of unchecked pollution and reduced environmental capacity.

The third threat to the river comes from the water-diversion project. Yangtze water will be transferred not only from south to north but also from south to south. In Jiangsu province in the lower reaches, for example, Yangtze water has been transferred to Lake Tai in an effort to make the polluted lake cleaner. In Yunnan province in the upper reaches, a plan with a similar aim has been approved: to divert water from the Jinsha (upper Yangtze) to Lake Dian in the provincial capital, Kunming. Many cities along the river are coming up with schemes to save their own lakes by following these examples, while paying no attention to whether doing so would serve to worsen the Yangtze’s condition.

We have to do something to defeat this triple threat, so that the tragedy of the Yellow, Huai and Hai rivers is not repeated on the Yangtze. What we can do at once is to take effective and urgent steps to tackle the pollution and bring hydropower development under control. Experience in recent years has shown that capital and technology are not the ultimate solutions to these problems, and that coming up with a new management model is more important. We need to build an environmental-management system that is more transparent, in which members of the public in the Yangtze valley participate, funds earmarked for pollution control are used wisely under public supervision, and decision-makers take environmental impacts into account in policy making.

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Editor’s footnote: 1 An old song about the Yangtze proclaims: “You nurture the children of various nationalities with your sweet milk.”