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China's growth harms people and rivers, experts say

China's indiscreet economic development strategy has been dramatically changing its geographical landscape, which might be inflicting serious harm on its people's right to health and life, as well as the global environment, experts said.

Commissioned by the Mainland Affairs Council, the group of specialists recently released their research reports after conducting a risk assessment of China's living environment.

Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢), an associate professor of National Taipei University, said that the water pollution crisis is the most pressing problem in China.

"It was estimated that about two-thirds of China's major cities are short of clean water and some 700 million, accounting for 53 percent of its population, have been supplied with unsafe drinking water contaminated by waste products," he said.

According to Wang, serious environmental disasters similar to last month's Songhua River in-cident -- in which the river was polluted with benzene and four million people were left without public water services -- are common throughout China.

"River-pollution problems have been on the rise. The polluted areas, in terms of the length of the rivers, increased from 22.1 percent in 1980 to 51.7 percent in the early 21st century -- 10.6 percent of which is seriously polluted," he said.

Wang said that the pollution has turned many Chinese villages into "cancer clusters," even most of the villages located along the Huai River -- the water system on which Beijing has spent the most money to help manage water conservancy.

"In the eight villages along the Hong River, the second-biggest branch of the Huar River, the death rate went up from 9.7 percent in 1994 to 12.2 percent last year. This is much higher than China's average annual death rate of 5 percent," Wang said.

He added that lung cancer, liver cancer and pancreatic cancers were the main causes of death in China.

The overuse of its natural resources which has recently caused large-scale landscape changes in China made it even harder for the government to solve its environmental problems, said Hsu Chih-chia (許志嘉), an assistant professor of Ming Chuan University.

"The Chinese government's policy to reclaim land from lakes between the 1950s and the 1980s has caused lake areas to shrink by 243 million square meters, or one-third of original areas," Hsu said.

As a result, flood-prone areas have expanded, the frequency of flood occurrences has increased and the global climate has been changed as well, he said.

While the Chinese government is aware of the consequences of the policy, the new problems lying ahead -- eg, how to relocate the numerous farmers who have been earning their living on the reclaimed land -- hindered the government from moving on this issue, Hsu said.

Meanwhile, with regard to China's air-pollution problem, Chen Chung-cheng (陳重成), an associate professor of Yu Da College of Bus-iness, said that China is one of the chief producers of acid rain in the world.

"About one-third of China's territory suffers from acid rain pollution, making China one of the world's three biggest acid-rain areas," Chen said.

As 75 percent of China's energy is produced from coal which emits about 19 million to 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually and accounts for one-seventh of global emissions, China has become the second biggest producer of carbon dioxide leading to global warming, second only to the US, he said.
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