From The Sydney Morning Herald:
It has been a long time since the Feng Chan He, the River of Fertility, in Xiditou ran clear and locals could swim and fish.
Today it is fetid and silted up, a casualty of the factories that line its banks and that brought unprecedented prosperity to this poor farming district near the port city of Tianjin.
Xiditou is now one of China’s growing number of so-called cancer villages, where locals say that the gross air, water and soil pollution over decades has caused an extraordinarily high number of cancer cases. [Full Text]
Read also Villages doomed by China’s cancer rivers by Richard Spencer, China’s ‘cancer villages’ pay heavy price for economic progress by Verna Yu, and Pollution Poisons China’s Progress by David J. Lynch.
