Beijing – The condition of one of China’s most polluted lakes has worsened despite two years spent trying to clean it up, the official China Daily reported on Tuesday. Waters flowing into Lake Tai, a scenic but heavily industrialised lake in eastern China, became more polluted this year, the China Daily said. It said 92 per cent of the lake, China’s third largest freshwater source, is now polluted and its water cannot be used for drinking. The deterioration has set back a 200-billion-yuan (HK$185 billion), decade-long plan to clean up the lake, the report said. Since the cleanup started in 1998, officials have closed hundreds of polluters, curbed fish-farming and constructed water treatment plants, China Daily said. But it added that the worst sources of pollution – industrial waste, fertilisers, sewage and oil leaking from ships – go unchecked. The frustrations cleaning up Lake Tai mirror the difficulties ending rampant, often health-threatening pollution elsewhere in China. While some culprit companies get shut down, often the biggest offenders go little punished, either because they are big employers or the problem is too widespread. The Yangtze River, China’s longest, has become more polluted as well. The river and its tributaries now receive more than 34 per cent of all of the mainland’s industrial waste water, the Legal Daily reported. To help solve the problem, 26 cities on the river have pledged to reduce the dumping of waste, the newspaper said. Cleaning up the Yangtze has become as top priority before its middle reaches are dammed by the Three Gorges Dam, beginning in 2003. Experts warn that without pollution controls the dam’s reservoir could become a huge cesspool.