Can China possibly deal effectively with a crisis of such staggering dimensions? People have very little to lose when they have no water to drink.

Tired and frustrated, Wang Guoxiang and other Xiangtan city officials were slurping a midnight snack of instant noodles last Friday when the anti-pollution chief for Hunan province walked into their crisis room. Immediately, Wang said, he stopped eating and shouted at the visitor.

At the top of his voice, he insisted that something be done to stop the discharge of poisonous metals that had begun three days earlier into the slow, meandering Xiang River, from which Xiangtan, 800 miles south of Beijing, draws its drinking water. As a people’s delegate, Wang recalled complaining to the environmental official, he and his allies had been fighting for months for more controls on upstream smelters but had found little support from the provincial authorities.

Workers take water samples from a smelter for testing after a cadmium spill last week in the Xiang River contaminated drinking water supplies in the downstream city of Xiangtan, 800 miles south of Beijing.

“You guys pay no attention to the safety of drinking water for our Xiangtan people. If you can’t solve the problem this time, your position is in danger,” Wang said he told the anti-pollution chief, Jiang Yimin. “And I wasn’t kidding,” he added.

The late-night confrontation in Xiangtan, a sprawling city of 500,000, was a telling episode in China’s latest pollution drama: the accidental release into the Xiang River of heavy doses of cadmium, a likely carcinogen, by a state-owned smelter in an industrial park about 25 miles upstream.

The fouling of the Xiang River attracted wide attention, but it was far from unique as China struggles to reconcile breakneck economic growth with protection of the environment. After more than two decades of swift industrialization, a recent government report found that up to 70 percent of the country’s rivers and lakes are seriously polluted.

Staggering. 70 percent of the water, unpotable, poisonous. Great article, and there’s a money quote:

The controlled press, meanwhile, published official assurances that drinking water was safe because of the emergency chemical treatment by Xiangtan’s water distribution system. Nevertheless, the news reports said, the river water still contained unhealthy amounts of cadmium.

The water is safe to drink. There is no SARS in Beijing.

You can fool some of the people some of the time….

The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office
By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 12, 2006

The country has set the bar so low for the performance of George W. Bush as president that it is effectively on the ground.
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No one expects very much from Mr. Bush. He’s currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that’s just George being George. Forget the complexities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or even the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unwarranted (pun intended)

(more…)

Urgent! Comments needed.

It is now six months to the day since the creation of what turned out to be the oddest, most memorable thread in the history of this little blog. I went back and read all of the comments last night, and was struck by how dramatic, complex and engrossing the saga was, as more and more commenters unveiled new information – it was the kind of denouement you’d expect to see only in the theater. It’s also the thread that best captures the characters and personalities of the commenters here, and seeing how each reacts as the story grows stranger and stranger is not only intriguing, it’s kind of thrilling. Maybe it’ll all be published some day.

(Comments here are closed. Go to the original post if you want to say something related to our friend.)

We’ve turned another corner, and the insurgents are on the run. Victory will be ours any moment now.

Two suicide bombers disguised as police infiltrated the heavily fortified Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad and blew themselves up Monday during celebrations of National Police Day, killing 29 Iraqis.

The attackers died before getting near the U.S. ambassador and senior Iraqi officials at the festivities, but the blasts capped a particularly deadly week for American and Iraqi forces.

Iraqi police also were searching for an American journalist who was kidnapped Saturday by gunmen who ambushed her car and killed her translator in Baghdad.

Jill Carroll, a 28-year-old freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor, was seized in Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni Arab al-Adel neighborhood. Police said she went there to see a Sunni Arab politician.

The escalating violence after the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections — at least 498 Iraqis and 54 U.S. forces have been killed — came as
Iraq’s electoral commission again delayed releasing the results of the vote.

Thank God for those elections.

If I sound mocking in tone, it’s not from lack of respect for the dead, Americans or Iraqi. It’s from the sense of outrage I feel about being constantly spoon-fed BS from Bush that we are winning, that the elections were the dawn of a new golden era, that there is now freedom and liberty and blah blah blah blah…. It’s an exact mirror of my lack of patience with the Chinese government. Their sins are so evident, their lies so blatant, I feel all I can do is hold up a mirror in front of their faces and hope that more people see just how huge the deceit is. There was a time when I was so optimistic, when I thought victory really was right around the corner. There was also a time when I really thought Hu was about to usher in new reforms. No more naivete. No more cutting them any slack.

If you want to read up on the death of Yao Wenyuan, last surviving member of the elite Gang of Four, you’ll have a hard time doing so in China, where coverage of his death and legacy has been severely limited (imagine that). Luckily, there’s a fine obituary in the Guardian that makes it clear what a scoundrel he was.

Yao Wenyuan, the last surviving member of the Gang of Four, who has died aged 74, was a literary polemicist whose pen, under Mao Zedong’s patronage, launched the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76). His vitriolic essays provided ammunition for Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing (Madam Mao) in their campaign to destroy senior communist leaders with whom they had fallen out, including the president Liu Shaoqi….

If the Gang of Four had not been arrested after Mao’s death in 1976, Yao, though devoid of practical experience in government, would have become one of China’s supreme leaders. In a popular cartoon published after their downfall, Jiang Qing is shown standing next to a deer on which a placard hangs proclaiming it to be a horse. The image is based on a story, satirising those who demand blind loyalty, which dates from the first Chinese imperial dynasty.

In the cartoon, the second most senior member of the gang, Zhang Chunqiao (obituary, May 13 2005) gives instructions to Yao, who has his notebook open. “Anyone who dares call it a deer,” said Zhang “take his name down!”

Have things changed that much? “We are pleased to announce there are no cases of SARS in Guangzhou….”

Lots more good stuff in the article. Thanks to the reader who alerted me.

As predicted by a few prescient bloggers in 2003, the ascension of Hu ushered in a new age of compassion and openness, finally bestowing on the people the freedom to speak one’s mind without fear of retribution or censure.

Chinese police blocked a private observance Monday of the anniversary of deposed Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang’s death, detaining the organizer and putting activists under house arrest.

The move underscored the government’s ongoing sensitivity over Zhao, purged from his position in 1989 after sympathizing with pro-democracy protests centered around Tiananmen Square.

Officers detained Li Jinping, a Zhao family friend, on Sunday, taking him from his Beijing home a day before he planned to hold the memorial service marking the Jan. 17, 2005, death of Zhao, who spent his last 15 years under house arrest after being ousted for expressing sympathy with the protesters.

“I don’t know where my brother is,” Li’s sister said by telephone. “We can’t find him. We have no way to get in touch with him.” She refused to give her name for fear of retribution.

Qi Zhiyong, who had been planning to go to attend the ceremony, said Li “is a very brave man.”

Li had better be “a very brave man”; he’s just been thrown head first into the mouth of hell. I hope he finds it consoling to know that the Party’s reforming.

Chat.

Photojournalist Stephen Voss has posted an extraordinary story on water pollution in Henan Province, as well as an array of photographs that go straight to the heart. (Click the link on his site to view thumbnails, and read the captions to the photos; some are quite heartbreaking.)

A snippet from his story:

The cancer ward of Shenqiu County Hospital is busy on this weekday morning. Bicycles and motorbikes are scattered around the dusty brick courtyard and a white doctor’s jacket hangs from a tree to dry. A line of people stand outside a small one-story concrete building, patiently waiting their turn for a few minutes with Dr. Wang Yong Zeng, the chief oncologist. Most carry their life’s medical records with them, clutching the thick folders full of X-rays and documents tightly to their chest.

Shenqiu County, in the eastern part of Henan Province, has seen occurrences of stomach, liver, esophageal and intestinal cancer rise dramatically in the past fifteen years. Houses sit empty where whole families have died, villagers are bedridden with sicknesses they are too poor to have diagnosed and many continue to drink the polluted water because there is no other option. The majority of the 150 million people that live along the Huai River Basin are farmers, and depend on the river water to irrigate their crops. Unfortunately, the Huai is one of the most polluted stretches of water in the country.

“Many people come here after it’s too late,” says Dr. Yong Zeng as he holds an X-ray up to the window light to examine it. Poor farmers suffer for months and even years before they go to the hospital, knowing that if they are diagnosed with cancer, they won’t be able to afford any treatment. In many villages, entire families go into debt for medical bills they will never be able to pay.

China’s handling of the environment has been nothing if not consistent over the past two thousand years. It is difficult to find a time in China’s history when anything but environmental devastation occurred in the name of economic and social progress. As far back as 202 BC, the Han Dynasty dealt with the growing population by urging its people to cut down forests to make way for more farmland.

Lots more, if you have the strength.

Hilarious.