(February 7, 2002) ‘With the health of villagers in the Han valley already compromised by foul-smelling rivers, the massive north-south water transfer scheme appears set to make matters worse.’

A cluster of cancer cases that has been linked to water pollution in a village downstream of the Danjiangkou dam in Hubei province highlights the human misery caused by China’s poisoned rivers.

It also raises fears that the south-north water transfer project, which will divert river water from central China to major cities in the arid north, will worsen the pollution and related health risks in villages such as Zhaiwan.

The blighted village of 3,400 people is situated about 100km below the Danjiangkou dam on the Han River, a major Yangtze tributary.

Zhaiwan’s Communist Party secretary, Zhai Zhanhong, says that more than 80 villagers have died of various cancers since 1999. He himself has lost four family members to cancer.

Dr Lin Fengrong of the Hubei Provincial Disease Prevention and Control Centre in Wuhan has found elevated levels of arsenic in samples of Zhaiwan’s drinking water. She estimates the cancer death toll at 130 in the past decade, but says establishing the true extent of the problem would require a major epidemiological study costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Though they may lack the scientific data to bolster their case, the villagers, and experts such as Dr Lin, believe the cancers in Zhaiwan are linked to the contaminated water in the Han River and village wells.

Another prominent doctor, Chen Huanchao, director of the Hubei Cancer Hospital in Wuhan, last year told the official Xinhua news agency that he is convinced of the connection between Zhaiwan’s tainted water and the village’s high cancer rate.

Yun Jianli, the 61-year-old founder of a local environmental group called Green Han River has spearheaded a river-cleanup campaign. In the course of their investigations, volunteers with her group found tributaries in the Han valley, the Diao and Li rivers, to be so severely polluted that the foul-smelling water was the colour of soy sauce.

Factories along the local rivers pour out effluent containing chemicals known to be harmful to human health. The village of Mazhuang on the Li River, for example, has eight paper mills, which produce toilet paper by means of primitive manufacturing processes. And to avoid detection by environmental inspectors, the factories are usually closed during the day, but go full blast at night when they can discharge untreated wastewater under cover of darkness.

Tests conducted in April last year by environmental officials from nearby Xiangfan city found a number of toxic substances in Zhaiwan’s drinking water, including chromium and benzene _ the same carcinogen that poisoned the Harbin water supply after a factory explosion in November caused a major leak into the Songhua River in northeast China.

Zhou Shengxian, the new director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, told a press conference on Jan 24 that a government survey conducted in the wake of the Songhua disaster found that more than 100 riverside chemical factories pose a serious threat to the nation’s drinking water.

Mr Zhou said that many of the plants had been built in inappropriate locations, without environmental impact assessments, and that information on the dangerous facilities would be published some time after the lunar New Year which began on Sunday.

It is not known whether any of the factories degrading the rivers in the Zhaiwan area appear on this list.

Wang Yongchen, a journalist who has become one of China’s leading environmental campaigners, wrote about Zhaiwan after travelling earlier this month to the region with Ma Jun, author of China’s Water Crisis.

The photos accompanying Ms Wang’s account include a recent petition letter about Zhaiwan’s water and heath crisis that villagers have signed up to by adding their fingerprint in red ink.

Ms. Wang and Mr. Ma are collaborating on project that focuses on China’s rivers, with the first instalment to be an in-depth look at the south-north water transfer project, the polluted Han River and its ardent defender, Green Han River founder Yun Jianli.

Scientists are concerned that the serious pollution in the Han basin will become even worse once water starts to be siphoned off as part of the national diversion scheme. The US$60-billion (2.3-trillion-baht) project is slated to convey water north along three separate canals, with an eastern, central and western route, each more than 1,000km long, moving a total of nearly 45 billion cubic metres of water to the north every year.

The Danjiangkou reservoir is to be the principal source of water for the middle route, with annual withdrawals of 9.5 billion cubic metres beginning in 2010, growing to 14 billion cubic metres a year by 2030. Work has already begun on raising the height of the Danjiangkou dam in order to increase the water-storage capacity of the huge reservoir behind it.

With less water available below the dam after the expansion of the reservoir, pollutants will become more concentrated and more dangerous in the downstream Han and its tributaries, water-quality experts warn. Zhaiwan’s troubles could be just a foretaste of massive problems ahead.

Local governments have made sporadic attempts to tackle the pollution problem. Xiangfan city, for example, spent 200 million yuan (100 million baht) on the construction of a wastewater treatment plant, the only such facility in the region. But during their recent trip, Ms Wang and Mr Ma visited the plant and found that it has closed its doors. Grass was growing inside the compound, and not a soul was around.

Residents of Zhaiwan village are already paying a steep price for where they live. Wang Yufeng, for example, has colorectal cancer, but has decided not to undergo the recommended surgery because one of her neighbours died as a result of the same operation.

When he was strong and healthy, Zhai Yuchun, now in his early 40s, was a rich man in the poor village. Few rural residents in China have medical insurance, and Mr. Zhai has now spent his entire fortune of 100,000 yuan (500,000 baht) on treatment for liver cancer.

When a reporter from Shanghai’s East Morning News (Dongfang zaobao) arrived to interview him, he found that Mr Zhai had gone to Wuhan for chemotherapy. And through a gaping hole in the front door, the reporter could see that there was very little left inside Mr Zhai’s once comfortable home.

The Tangbai River, a Han tributary, is also in a sorry state. One of the Zhaiwan villagers said: “When I was young, I used to swim in the Tangbai and drink the river water any time. Now no one dares swim in that water, let alone drink it.”

One elderly woman said she doesn’t even risk washing clothes in the river: “If you do, you immediately feel itchy when you put them on.”

The Tangbai was once famous for its tasty white fish (bai yu), which could grow to a metre long and weigh up to 20kg. Loved by people throughout the valley, the fish were considered a delicacy worthy of serving to visiting dignitaries. Now, the white fish is nowhere to be found.

The owner of a small shop near the confluence of the Han and Tangbai rivers told the Green Han River volunteers about one fisherman who was so happy last summer after landing 100 jin (50kg) of other fish species. But he was unable to sell a single one because everyone assumed the fish were poisoned to death in the river and then collected.

In other villages in the area, the volunteers heard stories of people losing all their teeth as a result of drinking river water and of a popular teahouse that had to close because of the tainted water. They also heard of villagers digging deeper and deeper wells, farther and farther away from nearby rivers, in their search for safe drinking water.

A school principal in Zhuji village on the Tangbai told the volunteers: “We drilled a well a mile away from the river, but the water was still unclean. So we dug much deeper, going 40 metres down, and that water looked nice, but a white towel put into it came out dark.”

Back in Zhaiwan, party secretary Zhai Zhanhong says the people of his village have been suffering for more than a decade because of the pollution, and the problems are more than medical.

By tradition in rural China, women move to their husband’s home after marriage.

“But no girls are willing to marry boys in Zhaiwan,” Mr Zhai said. “Even the girls in Zhaiwan have trouble finding anyone outside the village who will marry them. And when people from Zhaiwan go outside the village for work, even if they’re within walking distance they’d rather stay anywhere else than come back home for the night.”

What Mr Zhai and his village want most is not more detailed scientific analyses of their drinking water or long-term epidemiological studies of their health problems. They want money from somewhere, now, to drill a well as deep as they have to go to find a source of clean water.

Bangkok Post, February 7, 2002

Kelly Haggart is the editor of the Three Gorges Probe News Service where this article first appeared. The article draws on Wang Yongchen’s account of her recent trip to the Han valley; a report in the East Morning News “More than 100 die from cancer in a single village” (Oct 21, 2005); and material produced by Green Han River.