Meng and Ma are one of Shanghai’s most impressive double acts. They don’t crack jokes, they don’t sing and dance — at least not in office hours. No, they do something far more basic: one pours, the other flushes. Not just glasses, or cisterns, but entire lakes of water. More than five-million cubic gallons a day.
They are the Mr In and Mr Out of the city’s water system: Meng Mingqun, the lean, polished and bespectacled deputy director of the water supply administration, is the straight man who turns on the taps and fills the city’s glasses with chemically treated water. Ma Yuandong, the portly, cheerful, moon-faced director of the municipal drainage administration, is more like a slapstick clown, pulling the plugs and flushing away the smelly leftovers.
Although their act has to be repeated tens of millions of times a day, it ought to be one of the simplest in municipal administration, because Shanghai is triply blessed with water: it sits at the junction of the nation’s biggest river (the Yangtze), an impressively large tributary of that river (the Huangpu), and the world’s biggest ocean (the Pacific).
Yet that blessing is in danger of becoming a curse because of the speed at which China is fouling its waterways. After 25 years of the fastest development the world has ever seen, the country is unsurprisingly hailed as an economic miracle. But it is not hard to find the downside: all you need to do is peer down a sewer, taste a drop from almost any river, or consider where a glass of Shanghai water comes from.
Shanghai is the wealthiest and most environmentally conscious city in China, but its thirst has never been harder to quench, nor its effluent harder to manage. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping first launched his economic reforms, the population of Shanghai was 12-million. Today official figures put it at 13,5-million, although unoficially it is closer to 20-million. Its thickening forest of skyscrapers means that water is now being pumped up to altitudes of more than 400m, while the resultant waste — 5 300 000l a day — spreads out across a 6 500km-long sewage network that Ma’s office has expanded at the rate of about 80km a year. Over the next five years, they will build 16 new waste-treatment plants, in addition to the existing 20. And still they can’t keep up. More than a third of the city’s sewage is dumped in rivers untreated. ”The problems are so huge,” says Ma, ”that sometimes I can’t sleep at night.”
Meng’s job is only partially easier. His workers lay 2km of new pipes every year, while more than six new purification plants have boosted water supply capacity to 7 160 000m3 per day. He earnestly assures me that Shanghai’s water is so purified that it is not only drinkable, but among the highest quality urban water in China. I’ll take his word for it, but few locals seem to. A glass of Shanghai water is tinted a faint yellow, smells of chlorine and tastes like something you’d rather not swallow — most people boil it, or buy bottled water.
Four-fifths of the city’s drinking water currently comes from the Huangpu which reflects the bright lights of the Pudong skyscrapers and art-deco colonial buildings on the Bund, but it has become so dirty and expensive to treat that Meng says the city will soon have to start taking half its supplies from the more distant Yangtze. The trouble is that China’s environment is being ruined so quickly that even a glass of water from the mighty Yangtze may soon not be much of an improvement.
Better known in China as the Chang Jiang, or long river, the Yangtze has always been a symbol of power and prosperity. Traders — first in sampans, wupans and junks, later in imperial gunboats and international container ships — have made fortunes on its waters, buying and selling rice, tea, opium and coal in the crowded cities on its shores. Countless millions have lost lives and livelihoods in its famously treacherous waters and devastating floods. Challenging the Yangtze was a test of virility and vitality for an aging Mao Zedong, who first swam its width at the age of 64. For the Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai, it was a metaphor for loss and impermanence:
”That shadow is his lonely sail. Now it is gone, all the blue is empty now.
”All you can see is that long, long river that flows to the edge of the sky.”
For thousands of years, that journey — 3 964 miles (6 379km), uninterrupted by a single dam — remained unchanged.
These days, by the time it has reached Shanghai, it has supported 400-million people, or one in every 15 people on earth; driven the turbines of the world’s biggest hydroelectric plant, the Three Gorges dam; been sucked up and spat out by a growing cluster of super-cities, polluted by countless new factories, fish-farms and reclaimed farmland; and buffeted by heavy river traffic that now includes container ships, speedboats and tourist liners. It begins with some of the world’s purest water and ends so corrupted that the WWF says the Yangtze delta has become the biggest cause of marine pollution in the Pacific.
The first drops in Meng’s glass of water start at an altitude of 4km, trickling from the scissor-shaped Geladandong glacier on the Tibetan plateau. China’s leading glaciologist, Yao Taedong, warns that global warming is melting ice that has been locked in place for more than 5 000 years, but in the short term at least, this merely adds to the volume of the river, which, for the first 2 000 miles (3 200km) of its journey runs clean and fresh through some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in China. It will not stay pristine for much longer. The upper reaches of the Yangtze face an explosion of dam-building. According to the World Wildlife Federation and World Resource Institute, 46 major dams have been built or are under construction or being planned in the area. Among the most controversial is at the Tiger Leaping gorge — a world heritage site— where work has begun in recent months on a dam that will sweep away the area thought to have been the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri-La in Lost Horizon.
Meng’s water will be called upon there to generate electricity and slake the thirst of Kunming’s 6 million — soon to be 8 million — residents. The city ought to have abundant water resources of its own from the nearby Dian Chi lake, but that reservoir is now so polluted and heavily silted that the city is looking further upstream.
It is a familiar story, as more than 200-million peasants have moved off the land and into the cities in the past two decades. These cities may be mere specks on the map, but along the upper reaches of the Yangtze they have populations bigger than Birmingham and waterways as foul as any in Britain’s industrial era. Take Chongqing, the next recruitment point for our glass of water, which is now coloured a distinctive chocolate brown from the clay bed. Few Britons are likely to have heard of this bustling city, but it has grown even faster than Shanghai. Thanks to a recent redrawing of boundaries, Chongqing is now the biggest municipality in the world, with a population of more than 30-million. It is also a major polluter. According to the municipal environment records published in the local media, Chongqing pumped out 1,3-billion tonnes of waste water last year, 90% of which ran into the Yangtze and other rivers untreated, adding to a contamination corridor that stretches from Sichuan to Hubei province. In the past, the fast-flowing river could clean itself, but the construction of the giant Three Gorges dam hundreds of miles downstream of Chongqing has raised fears that the 600km lake behind it will become a huge cesspool. The government insists that water quality has not deteriorated since the dam was closed last year, but that raises the question of why it is spending £2,8-billion on 320 new water treatment facilities in the area. Fisheries officials have no doubt that the ecology has changed.
From Chongqing, our nitrate-thick water comes under increasing pressure as the population density increases in the lower valley and flood plains. According to Professor Lu Jianjian of the East China Normal University, pollution belts have caused water-supply problems in 26 cities along the river, including Shanghai. (The Yangtze’s tributaries are even worse affected. Earlier this year, Sichuan Chemicals Group was found guilty of the most serious water pollution case ever reported in China. The dumping of nitrogen and ammonia into the Tuojiang killed 120 000kg of fish and left a million residents without water for several days.)
The government is aware of the problems. Prime minister Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao have stressed the need for ”balanced development”, but fine-sounding central government regulations on pollution are easily circumvented in a political climate that mixes regional autonomy, corruption and media censorship. It’s not hard to find cases of flagrant violations. This year a China Development Research Institute survey found that more than half of the 394 major waste outlets along the Yangtze failed to meet government standards. Local media report that 50 000m3 of waste from paper-mills fails to reach the safety standards set by the authorities. The 100 000 ships that navigate the Three Gorges every year are legally obliged to dispose of their waste at onshore plants, but an investigation this year by Xinhua News Agency found that nearly 99% of the vessels dump their sewage and oil untreated into the river.
Factories and ships are simply the most identifiable sources of pollution. A greater problem is uncontrolled logging on the upper and middle reaches of the river, which has caused hundreds of millions of tons of extra silt to sweep down into the flood plains. On this reclaimed land many of China’s new towns and cities are being built, entrepreneurs are establishing fish farms and peasants are over-using fertilisers in their river-side fields. By the time it reaches Shanghai, even Meng admits that it would not be a very good idea to scoop up a glassful of the Yangtze and drink it without treatment — though many impoverished river-side dwellers still do just this.
You can’t really blame them. At the estuary, the river is so vast that it looks unpollutable, an endless resource, its far banks too distant to be discerned through the coastal haze and the smog from the giant Baoshan steelworks. Here, at its mightiest, the Yangtze pumps out 900-billion tonnes of water a year. Yet even this is not enough to dilute the pollution that flows into the East China sea, which has in recent years suffered increasingly frequent ”red tides” of algae that stretch for thousands of square kilometres and suffocate fish. The same is true — and in many cases, worse — near the mouths of other Chinese rivers: according to a report by the State Oceanic Administration this year, some offshore areas are now entirely devoid of life.
Yet the development goes on unchecked. As you read this article, Chinese engineers are building the world’s biggest dam, highest railway, longest suspension bridge and tallest building. Construction sites ring day and night with the sound of hammers and drills as China builds homes for the 300-million more peasants it plans to urbanise over the next 16 years.
And the faster everything grows, the dirtier the environment becomes. Acid rain now falls on a third of the Chinese landmass. According to the World Bank, the country is home to 16 of the planet’s 20 worst cities for air quality. Three-quarters of the rivers running through Chinese cities are so polluted that they cannot be used for drinking or fishing; amazingly, the Yangtze is considered one of the cleaner specimens.
The case of the Yellow river, known as the cradle of Chinese civilisation because its valleys were home to the Han clans that built the Chinese empire 4 000 years ago, is instructive. Once the country’s second-biggest source of fresh water, it is now so polluted that 70% is hazardous to drink, and so over-exploited that the water no longer reaches the sea for a third of the year.
Environmentalists such as Patrick McCully of the International Rivers Network warn that in another 25 years, the Yangtze could suffer the same fate. Even government researchers say that the entire Yangtze valley faces water shortages by 2030. And their gloomy estimate does not even taken into account the latest wet dream of the country’s hydroengineering leaders — the diversion of billions of tonnes of water from the Yangtze to the arid north of China. Construction has already begun on this mega-project, which will dwarf the mighty Three Gorges dam in scale, cost and environmental consequences.
”Everyone is playing the same game with the Yangtze,” says Ma Jun, the author of China’s Water Crisis. ”And the impact will be felt in Shanghai. This is a city that ought to be the water capital of the world, but right now it is in trouble. Despite its rivers, Shanghai has one of the lowest ratios of drinkable water to people in the country.”
But there are signs that leaders are waking up to the risks. The Shanghai mayor, Han Zhen, for example, is talking a little bit more about conservation and a little bit less about development. ”We have to change the model of economic growth,” he told me. ”Until now, it has been based on an increased consumption of energy and resources, but this is clearly not sustainable. We are looking at ways to build a more sustainable economic model.” They are aiming to meet EU quality standards by 2010.
Meng and Ma can feel a change. Although they still have to share the same modest old municipal drainage office, they say their work is appreciated more than in the past. ”You ask me what is the difference,” says Meng. ”It is that a drop of Shanghai water is far more valuable than it was 20 years ago. People here used to take it for granted, but now we all know that resources are limited and precious.”
He is an optimist, the sort who believes that Shanghai’s growing wealth will bring environmental improvements, the sort who sees the glass half-full. Ma, however, warns that it could empty fast unless attitudes change. ”Development has brought pollution. We must do much more to protect and preserve our water. And we must recycle more.”
It is impossible to disagree. Mao would never dare to swim its waters if he were alive today. And it might soon be necessary to reverse the lines of Li Bai:
”All you can see was that long, long river that flows to the edge of the sky.
”Now it is gone, all the blue is empty now.” — Guardian Unlimited Â