AP News, June 12th, 2007
Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday ordered a formal probe into the massive algae growth that smothered one of China's biggest lakes, drawing high-level attention to growing threats facing the country's water bodies.
Citing pollution as its main cause, Wen said the Lake Tai algae outbreak "has sounded the alarm for us," the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Despite attempts to improve the lake's water quality, "the problem has never been tackled at the root," Wen said in a statement read during a water quality seminar held by the State Council, China's Cabinet.
The sudden outbreak of blue-green algae smothered the lake late last month, forcing millions of residents of the lakeside city of Wuxi to drink and bathe with bottled water. The algae bloom lasted six days until it was flushed out by rain and water from the nearby Yangtze River.
State media and government experts criticized local officials for trying to blame the problem on natural conditions, and for ignoring pollution and its effects.
Newspapers reported Monday that five officials were fired or otherwise punished for failing to stem pollution in the lake.
Media also said the central government has ordered towns around the lake to establish sewage treatment plants, and has issued new emissions standards for the area's chemical factories.
Last week, the government demanded that officials close "several hundred" lakeside factories by the end of the month.
Residents near the lake have campaigned for years for the closure of polluting factories.
Yet despite the increased government attention, authorities continue to detain one of the most active campaigners, salesman-turned-environmentalist Wu Lihong. Wu, detained in April, faces extortion charges that friends and family say were concocted to punish him for exposing local government inaction.
Wu's trial has been postponed, but his continued detention seems to underscore the ruling Communist Party's discomfort with independent activists, as well as strong links between local officials and private industries they are supposed to regulate.
Lake Tai, famed for centuries for its beauty, has been hit hard by pollution from industries in the densely populated, fast-developing region, 80 miles west of Shanghai.
Hundreds of small, widely scattered chemical plants on the lake's western shore are among the most notorious.
Authorities around China acknowledge that most water bodies are polluted, and that about a quarter of the population has no access to safe drinking water.
A plan announced Monday requires the 20,000 chemical plants in the Lake Tai valley to meet tougher standards for sulfur dioxide emissions and chemical oxygen demand, a water pollution index, Xinhua said. Those that fail to meet the new standards by the June 2008 deadline risk suspension or closure.
Also, towns around Lake Tai must set up sewage treatment plants and can no longer discharge untreated sewage into the lake and area rivers, Xinhua reported. Existing plants must install nitrogen and phosphorus removal facilities before the deadline.
