The New York Times
September 3, 2006

There is no shortage of environmental laws in China, but the dire pollution problems persist, in part because environmental protection is often subverted by local protectionism, corruption and regulatory inefficiency.

Urad Qianqi, China: Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away. Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake. The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country with too many of them. But Sugai should have been different. The two mills had already been sued in a major case, fined and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a serious spill into the Yellow River in 2004. The official response to that spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution – until the later spill at Sugai revealed that local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders.