China’s next generation will depend on leaders making good on their promises for cleaner growth
At a conference in Ethiopia this week, the world is discussing the funding for a new set of international goals on sustainable development. Any global attempt to push for sustainability will need the world’s biggest country on board. China represents a fifth of the world’s population, and after more than three decades of high speed growth it is grappling with the challenge of cleaning up environmental damage and creating a more sustainable future. China Editor Carrie Gracie visited Hunan Province in central China to assess the progress of the cleanup there.
Water should be a life giver. But in the fields of Zhubugang it is a silent killer.
Yang Juqing, 68, is irrigating her fields of green pepper and aubergine. But her water is polluted with industrial waste. She leads me along a fetid ditch which is full of black bubbling water leading back to a high brick factory wall with smokestack chimneys behind.
This land was once known as China’s basket of rice and fish. But Zhubugang is also rich in minerals. So as China became the factory to the world, this area became a centre for the chemical industry.
The crops began to suffer: untreated effluent in the water, heavy metals in the soil, sulphur dioxide in the air.
Tendrils of vine wind up a bamboo frame and Mrs Yang reaches across to pluck a winter melon, cracking it open and showing me the rotten inside. She’s been farming here all her adult life but she says that in recent years, the crops have been useless.
“Here in this village, many people have cancer. Three people died in the space of as many months. They were all so young. It’s so toxic here,” Mrs Yang says.
China is often congratulated for pulling hundreds of millions of people from poverty. But wealth has come at a terrible price. Unregulated smokestack industries have ravaged the environment and damaged the health of generations.
Next door to Mrs Yang, the neighbours are sliding the lid off the well in their courtyard to pump water from twenty metres underground.
They tell me they buy bottled water for the baby, but they can’t afford it for the rest of the family.
The wife holds the end of the rope as the husband tentatively lowers the pump down the well shaft. She jerks her chin in the direction of the forest of chimneys on the other side of the fish pond.
“If it wasn’t for the factories that would be clean water down there but because of them it’s heavily polluted.”
