September 1, 2016
The campus of the Changzhou Foreign Languages School in Jiangsu Province, China, in April, after state TV reported nearly 500 illnesses there.
Imaginechina, via Associated Press
BEIJING — The prestigious school in eastern China that became the focus of national outrage last spring after nearly 500 students fell ill has been tested and classified as environmentally safe, the city government of Changzhou has said.
But parents and many others are voicing doubts, and anger, about the findings.
The illnesses at Changzhou Foreign Languages School caused an uproar across China after a report in the state news media said that more than 20 percent of students at the school had gotten sick — a few cases as severe as leukemia and lymphoma — possibly because a nearby field was polluted.
In a brief announcement late last week, the Changzhou city government said that investigators had concluded that the air, soil and water at the school were safe after conducting tests from April 19 to May 20.
Some people called on the government to offer more details.
Cheng Qian, a campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia, said the report was an attempt to dissociate the children’s illnesses with the nearby field, the site of several former pesticide plants.
Ms. Cheng said that although the city’s announcement acknowledged that the site — called Changlong land after Jiangsu Changlong Chemicals Company, one of the manufacturers that moved away in 2010 — had problems and that the government had punished 10 low-level officials by disciplining or dismissing them, it failed to detail the extent of the pollution at the site and how the government planned to deal with the environmental risks. “We only roughly know that the Changlong land isn’t safe,” she said.
She added that the report also failed to disclose details of how the school’s environment was tested. “This is not a thorough report, so this conclusion seems light,” Ms. Cheng said by telephone on Tuesday.
After the school, which has 2,400 students, opened a 153-acre campus near the field last fall, dozens of students complained of having rashes and nosebleeds and of a foul odor in the air.
The announcement from the Changzhou government said that the air around the school “has no major differences” from the air in a city park, identified as a “clean spot.”
It added that the soil and underground water tested did not contain any of the key contaminants found in the nearby field. The announcement also said that examinations had shown that the physical condition of the school’s junior high graduates of 2016 did not have “significant differences” from the physical condition of students at other schools.
Li Jixiang, a government employee at the Changzhou city news department, said that the local government did not know further details because the investigation had been overseen by central government agencies.
On Sina Weibo, a Chinese social network, many people voiced their anger after the announcement, asking why so many children had fallen ill if the school’s environment was safe. Some have called for the government to publish its original reports on the investigation and the testing.
In April, the state broadcaster, China Central Television, aired a scathing report about the Changzhou school, prompting heated discussions across the country about school safety. The report said that out of 641 students examined by doctors, or 27 percent of the student body, 493 were found to be ill.
At the time, the government’s report had been seen by some as a promising step to deal with the chemical industry.
The Chinese magazine Caixin broke the school story in February. It said that many students at the school started to fall ill in late 2015. Caixin reported that parents had discovered that the local government had piled soil at a nearby site when it tried to reclaim the land after several pesticide factories had moved away.
After parents determined that the foul smell at the school was from the site and questioned the school and the authorities, the local government called off its land reclamation project, the magazine said. It quoted former employees of Jiangsu Changlong Chemicals who said that toxic waste had been buried at the site before it moved in 2010.
The Changzhou government has insisted the school’s environment is normal. On April 25, a week after China Central Television reported on the case, the Changzhou government published a report saying that its initial investigation had shown that the air quality at the school “does not show obvious abnormal conditions.”
