The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time China blog reports that environmental activist Wu Lihong is out of jail and back to his work raising awareness of the pollution in Lake Tai: Mr. Wu’s biggest crime appears to be what...
From The Economist: Polluted, poisonous and immune to popular efforts to enforce a clean-up: Tai Lake is a metaphor for the state of China’s politics. The plain-clothes police are always there, watching Xu Jiehua. When she...
From Shanghai Daily: A large outbreak of algae has appeared in Taihu Lake four months earlier than usual, raising concerns that the pollution may mirror last year’s water crisis again in the nearby city of Wuxi, Jiangsu...
Following a debilitating algae bloom on Lake Tai in Wuxi last year, Chinese authorities have vowed to clean up their act. From the New York Times: The State Council, China’s cabinet, ordered strict regulation of the release of wastewater, the closing of heavily polluting factories near lakes, the improvement of sewage treatment facilities and strict […]
From Reuters: More than 1,000 chemical plants will be forced to close around the shores of China’s third-largest lake due to an increase in pollution charges following an outbreak of algae bloom earlier this year. In late May and early June, the giant Taihu Lake was covered in a thick foul-smelling canopy of green algae […]
The New York Times gives an update on the legal case of environmental activist Wu Lihong: A court in Wuxi, in eastern Jiangsu Province, upheld the conviction of Wu Lihong, who became well known around China for seeking to prevent chemical companies from dumping untreated waste in Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake. The ruling […]
From AFP: China will invest more than 14 billion dollars to clean up its third-largest freshwater lake, which has been devastated by the unchecked waste from thousands of factories, state media said Friday. Over the next five years, east China’s Jiangsu province will spend 108.5 billion yuan (14.4 billion dollars) on improving the quality of […]
Translated by CDT from Xinhua: The Jiangsu provincial environmental protection bureau recently issued a pollutant control quota regime for sewage treatment plants and major industrial factories around Lake Tai, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2008. This is the first major revamp of the pollutant control standards since the algae bloom in the […]
Third of the New York Times’s environmental series this year, and multimedia package along with this installment: Lake Tai, the center of China’s ancient “land of fish and rice,” succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste. The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than […]
A fishing boat on Tai Lake in Wuxi, by 3water
China’s outspoken environmental official is sounding the alarm again, in his article published by Reporters’ Observation magazine. Translated by CDT: Since this summer, a succession of blue algae bloom cases in Lakes Tai (§™Êπñ), Dian (ʪáʱ†) and Chao (Â∑¢Êπñ) signaled a strong message: the traditional development model’s accumulated environmental costs have reached a tipping point. […]
The Christian Science Monitor has a report on environmental activist Wu Lihong, who was recently sentenced to three years in prison for his attempts to clean up the polluted Lake Tai: Becoming a political or social activist has long been a solitary, sometimes dangerous path in China. The treatment of Wu and other whistle-blowers who […]
There’s a consensus that Chinese polluters don’t worry too much about fines. Now it looks as if things may change, starting in Jiangsu Province. Translated from Xinhua: Eleven years after the introduction of the “Regulation on Prevention of Water Pollution in Jiangsu’s Taihu Lake” (ʱüËãèÁúŧ™ÊπñʵÅÂüüÊ∞¥Ê±°ÊüìÈò≤Ê≤ªÊù°‰æã), the provincial government now has to toughen its environmental laws […]
Time to win the new war on Taihu Lake pollution. An old one has pretty much lost. Translated from Southern Weekend: Wu Shouxin (Âê¥ÂØøÈë´), a 68-year-old retired teacher, lives right off a tiny river called Lengdu Gang (ÂÜ∑Ê∏éÊ∏Ø), part of the water system of Taihu Lake. His first thing every morning, over the past seven […]
Jiangsu is acting to save Taihu. Seems pretty serious, but see what happens. Translated from reports via sina.com (photo: Taihu’s blue-green algae crisis via sina.com): It’s learned from the July 7 Taihu Lake pollution clean-up conference that Jiangsu is getting serious to save the lake from further endangering the livelihoods and the drinking water of […]
Since arresting Wu Lihong, Chinese authorities have tested the water in Lake Taihu and declared that it is safe for human consumption by international water quality standards. Industrial pollution and waste contributed to the algae bloom. From China Daily: Experts from the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and […]
From the International Herald Tribune: Fetid blue-green algae has appeared in an eastern Chinese lake but does not threaten water supplies, state media reported, a week after similar algae contaminated millions of people’s drinking water in a neighboring province. Environmental officials in Anhui province were closely monitoring the potentially poisonous algae bloom in Lake Chao, […]
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