Disaster In China's `Rust Capital' -- Chongqing Drenched In Acid Rain

CHONGQING, China - Frequent acid rains make this industrial powerhouse China's "rust capital" - a hot spot within the massive environmental disaster spreading through the world's largest nation.

Perched on hills along the Yangtze River in southwest China, Chongqing (formerly Chungking) is drenched in acid rain more than once every five days. The tainted rains result from a bad combination: the city's steep terrain, its wet climate and the high sulfur content of the coal burned by its heavy industries.

Chongqing's 4 million residents also are afflicted with acid fogs and acid dust. Sometimes, they even receive nasty "black rains," rains turned ink-black by airborne industrial ash.

New buildings quickly look old because of the dark streaks left by the polluted rains. Withered trees along the city's streets have been replaced three times since the 1960s.

A report by the city's environmental-protection bureau claims Chongqing is China's most polluted big city. Even if true, the problems here represent only a small part of the environmental debacle building in China because of its explosive industrial growth and inattention to pollution controls.

China's environmental problems "are more severe than at comparable periods of economic development in industrialized countries," a World Bank report found. And these problems bode poorly for the quality of life of more than a fifth of the world's population.

Most urban ground-water sources are polluted. Many cities, particularly in northern China, face dire water shortages. Most waste water is dumped untreated into waterways. Only 40 percent of urban Chinese and one in seven rural Chinese have safe drinking water. Inland fisheries are dying; red tides and other signs of contaminated coastal waters are on the rise.

The air in several Chinese cities is among the worst in the world. Because of China's heavy reliance on burning coal for energy, sulfur-dioxide levels in virtually all its cities far exceed international standards. Air pollution is the leading cause of disease.

Despite massive tree-planting campaigns in recent years, forest cover has shrunk to about 13 percent of China's total area, compared to the world average of 31 percent. This has led to increased droughts, flooding, erosion and silting of waterways. A sixth of China's arable land has been damaged by erosion. Soil fertility is dropping, deserts growing, and grasslands and wetlands shrinking.

Garbage, industrial wastes and toxic wastes are piling up on the edges of China's cities. Booming but often primitive rural industries are rapidly polluting the countryside. China's remaining wild lands, valuable sources of biodiversity, are dwindling so fast that most may be gone within a few decades.

Within this bleak picture, China is making some efforts to protect its environment.

Unlike most developing nations, it has put in place a comprehensive set of environmental laws over the past 15 years and, at least on the national level, a fairly extensive regulatory apparatus.

Authorities this year published an ambitious plan, called Agenda 21, for doing much more to control pollution.

Environmental problems also are getting a lot more attention in China's state-controlled media, including some relatively aggressive investigative reporting. And statements about the need to control pollution are cropping up more in leading officials' rhetoric.

But China wants the world's richer nations to provide money and technology so it can find ways to develop without more environmental damage. Even with a recent World Bank loan, such aid has not yet been given on a large scale.

So, despite some progress, any environmental gains in recent years have been more than offset by China's rapid industrial growth. And with the Communist Party's legitimacy staked on providing an ever-rising living standard, most local officials these days still emphasize economic growth at any cost.

In Chongqing, the city's environmental-protection bureau has never closed a polluting factory and it only fines about 10 to 20 companies a year, says Wang Gang, the bureau's planning chief.

His bureau's inspectors attempt to concentrate on the most serious 200 to 300 polluters among Chongqing's 8,000 factories. But with many aged polluters, Wang says, the best his bureau can do is hope these factories go bankrupt and shut down.

As a sign of progress, Wang cites a drop in incidence of the city's acid rains over the past five years from 90 to 78 a year.

But only one facility in Chongqing, a large power plant, has installed modern scrubbers on its smokestacks to clean its emissions. And average levels of sulfur dioxide and suspended particles in the city's air remain far above the safety standards set by the World Health Organization.

Likely a result of the high concentration of airborne particles, the cancer rate in Chongqing's central district is twice that of its rural areas.

And Chongqing's environmental problems aren't limited to air pollution. Lacking a sizable sewage-processing plant, the city pumps more than a billion tons of largely untreated industrial and household waste into the waters of the upper Yangtze River, central China's lifeline.

"The people in the factories just don't want to spend any money on pollution-control equipment," Wang says.

The World Bank report, released two years ago, predicts that saving money this way may turn out to be very costly as China's pollution problems eventually could have a "severe braking effect" on the nation's economic growth rate.