China's top environment official has lambasted the nation's failure to enforce environmental laws, saying more enforcement is crucial to stemming worsening pollution.
"Non-enforcement and lax enforcement of laws and administrative inactivity are the main targets we must aim at," Xie Zhenhua (
Continued failure to enforce the law would make it difficult to stem expanding environmental degradation that has made China's air, water and soil pollution some of the worst in the world, he said.
Xie made it clear that pollution in China was so bad that it was not a question of cleaning up but of stopping things from getting worse.
"We will strive to realize the general goal of basically stopping the deterioration of China's environment," Xie said.
While reiterating the Communist Party mantra to "rule the country by law," he further lamented the misguided and unregulated practice of maximizing short-term economic profits at the expense of the environment.
National People's Congress Vice Chairman Sheng Huaren (盛華仁) admitted that the 1984 Law on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution had utterly failed. This had left 300 million rural residents without access to safe drinking water, including 190 million drinking contaminated water.
"Last year, water from half the tested sections of China's seven major rivers was undrinkable because of pollution," Sheng was quoted as saying by the China Daily in a report on the law's implementation. "The water quality of the country's major rivers has continued to worsen."
Sheng urged the government to set detailed goals to prevent water pollution and to spend more on trying to stop pollution and soil erosion in the upper reaches of major rivers.
In cities, where 42 percent of China's 1.3 billion people live, more than two decades of rapid economic development and fast urbanization have made sewage disposal nearly impossible, he said.
As a result, 90 percent of river sections in urban areas were heavily polluted, as were most urban lakes.
One-third of non-industrial sewage in the cities went untreated on average, while no treatment was carried out at all in 193 of China's 500 biggest cities, the report said.
Two-thirds of Chinese cities lack an adequate water supply, and one in every six suffers severe shortages. This was made worse by the widespread pollution of both surface and underground water.
Sheng said China's sewage-discharge volume had increased year on year, despite the government pouring some 111.5 billion yuan (US$13.5 billion) into sewage treatment since 2001.
Environmental problems go even further. Experts say raging floods and landslides triggered by torrential rain, which have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks, are largely a result of "prolonged reckless human activities in the past decades," Xinhua said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
RSS