An archive photo shows people tilling a field in Xiaogang. Courtesy of Yan Hongchang
A HISTORY OF NEGLECTED WASTEWATER TREATMENT By the beginning of the 1980s, many farmers had replaced night soil (human waste) with chemical fertilizers. These chemical fertilizers, in addition to waste from the nation’s growing industrial sector and untreated city wastewater, left 80 percent of the country’s rivers polluted.8 In the 1980s and 1990s, most factories did not have (or did not turn on) wastewater treatment equipment, and three-quarters of all municipal wastewater in China was directly discharged into rivers without treatment.9 Dams and land reclamation for crops caused lakes to shrink, exacerbating the water pollution crisis. Hunan Province’s Dongting, at one time the largest freshwater lake in China, shrunk by almost two-thirds.10 In response to increasing health and environmental threats from wastewater, Chinese policymakers formulated more stringent and proper treatment practices and policies. China created its National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) in 1982, which quickly passed the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law in 1984. While weaker than its U.S. counterpart, the 1972 Clean Water Act, the legislation was the first to prioritize wastewater treatment in China. Unfortunately, NEPA was an underfunded sub-ministerial agency that lacked strong enforcement capacity. From 1982 to the early 2000s, most wastewater regulation in China focused only on pollution cleanup, targeting three lakes (Taihu, Chaohu, and Dianchi) and three rivers (Huaihe, Haihe, and Liaohe).11 Cleaning up these heavily polluted waterbodies was a major policy and target under several five-year plans, yet it registered little impact. Officials overseeing the clean up of Lake Dianchi in 1997 reported that “no matter how much dredging we do, there will still be pollutants in the water. Because of years of abuse, the ecosystem is very fragile. Blue algae blooms are common.”12 In the Tenth Five-Year Plan (FYP, 2001-2005), China’s leadership began pushing for more holistic water pollution prevention laws, moving beyond clean-up strategies to improving wastewater treatment standards.
1982 - 2000
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