While China is often in the news for its air pollution, the nation's less-publicized water pollution is just as serious and perhaps harder to tackle. In a report from China Dialogue, Ma Jun, China’s most famous water expert said, "Water pollution poses a bigger health threat (when compared to air pollution) to about 300 million people living in rural areas."
In the world’s most-populous nation – of roughly 1.4 billion people – some 577 million live in rural China. China's Central government has released an ambitious plan to tackle the nation's water pollution crisis. However, observers say this is inhibited by a lack of data, particularly for groundwater. Based on the uncompleted water, garbage and soil official data, Shen Sunan, a senior researcher from The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) said it’s very hard to tell where is the worst polluted rural area in China.
Nanyang, central China's Henan Province, a once-pristine, unpolluted countryside is now tainted by factory sewage and domestic garbage because of the unstrained economic development. The rural water pollution is severe, human waste; factory sewage, livestock manure, pesticides, and garbage heavily pollute the rivers. Villagers are suffered from the undrinkable or even hazardous underground water. However, on China’s real-time water pollution map, there are no pollution data about the county where Shuang Village and Zhao Village are located. Shen said, "there’s no data available on the official website so we can’t get it."
“The poorer the area, the more serious the pollution is”, said by a local EPA officer who doesn’t want to give out his name. Because it’s too sensitive for him to talk about the local pollution issue publicly. “It’s very complex to tackle the rural non-point area pollution, it’s very costly, one small town in Sheqi county will cost around 11 million yuan (nearly US$1.6 million) The difficulties we are facing with are insufficient fund and low personal qualities of rural residences, it’s hard to maintain sustainable clean area. ”
The EPA officer also claims that the local government has done piloting projects and "toilet revolution" project to prevent rural area pollution. There are three piloting towns in the county, Qiaotou, Lidian, Miaodian all have been treated after pollution. Each small town got about 11 million yuan. The fund is given by Henan province, and the county government doesn't have the fund for tackling local rural area pollution, now Sheqi County still has 14 towns that are heavily polluted and waiting for environmental treatment.
Sheqi, a county of Nanyang city, has implemented the “toilet revolution” project in recent years. The local government has reconstructed more than 12000 rural toilets, it belongs provincial-level project, environmental friendly, before this project, they also built a lot of biogas toilets. But the villagers are not using them anymore. At present, the new houses in the countryside are using flush toilets. The problem is that they dumped their waste casually. This involves rural sewage treatment. The farmer's house looks clean, but the village looks dirtier.
Nanyang city has wastewater treatment plants; however the rural areas of Nanyang, southern Henan don’t have any of them. It is difficult to tackle rural area pollution because the rural area is vast, the economy of rural villages remains underdeveloped, rural people are busy struggling with survival; they don’t really care about their health at the first place.
“Nowadays, the most serious rural area pollution is the livestock manure and sewage discharged by the small pig farm. Affected by the domestic market has imported pork in a large scale, the small pig farms shut down their business initiatively,” the local EPA officer, “the countryside not only has numerous plastic bags but also has the untreated manure discharged by pig farms. This is a common phenomenon in rural areas of central China.”
China Water Risk Director Debra Tan told CNN penalties and factory shutdowns had increased in the new policy's wake, Penalties collected in 2016 are over 4 billion yuan ($580 million), up 34% year on year and over 50,000 companies had to either shut down or halt operations. Water pollution---caused primarily by industrial waste, chemical fertilizers and raw sewage--- accounts for half of the $69 billion that the Chinese economy loses to pollution every year. Thus, $580 million is relatively a small amount of money compare to the numerous cost of prevention and control rural water pollution.
Both the central and local government have released regulations and laws on prevention and control of water pollution. In April 2015 the State Council has announced a major action to tackle water pollution -- the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan, or Water 10. It was a broad plan focused on specific polluting industries and gave targets to be met by 2020 and 2030 for water quality across the country, among other initiatives.
Even though the government has implemented "police chiefs" combat water pollution in central China. However, according to the anonymous local EPA officer, these police chiefs were basically a publicity stunt, in terms of specific implementation, only the recovery of the polluted rivers in the county is more effective."
According to the data of Ministry of Land and Recourses via China Water Risk, in the northern part of China, 78.8% of shallow water and 76.9% of deep water are polluted and should not touch human skin. The poorer the area, the more serious the pollution is. Polluted water with hazardous rank could cause different kinds of diseases.
Greenpeace research shows, nearly half the country has missed its five-year water quality targets; including 14 provinces, such as Liaoning, Henan, Beijing, etc. Among them, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan and Shanxi not only failed to complete the "12th Five Year Plan" water quality improvement target but also showed a trend of deterioration of water quality during the “12th Five Year Plan” period.
"We still have a lot of work to do," Vice-Minister Zhao Yingmin told media in November 2016, "First, I'd say the point of inspections is to discover problems, and indeed we discovered in some places water quality has gotten significantly worse," he said, noting, though, that the overall situation was improving. Over the first nine months of 2016, 70.3 percent of samples taken from 1,922 surface water sites around China could be used as drinking water, up 4 percentage points from a year ago, Zhao said.
In 2016 the Chinese government said it would spend 430 billion yuan ($62.4 billion) on around 4,800 separate projects aimed at improving the quality of its water supplies, though it did not give a timeframe.
The General Office of the CPC (Central Committee Office of the State Council) issued the "Three-year Action Plan for the Improvement of Rural Human Settlements Environment" in February 2018. The action plan points out by 2020, the rural living environment will be significantly improved, in eastern area and the suburban areas of the Midwest cities; the rural household garbage disposal system has been basically completed, and the rural household toilets have been basically reformed. By processing or utilizing resources, the rate of treatment of rural domestic sewage has increased significantly. The areas in the central and western regions that have better foundations and basic conditions have strived to treat 90% of the village's household garbage. The penetration rate of sanitary latrines has reached 85%, and domestic sewage has been randomly distributed and controlled. The road traffic conditions in the village have been significantly improved.
"You need infrastructure, and there is a deficit that we have to catch up ... but the problem is how to find the motivation to clean up and behave properly and stop pollution at the source," Ma Jun from IPE said to Reuters.
