Industrial Advances

"We should leave to our future generations a beautiful homeland with green fields, clean water and a blue sky ... in a new era of socialist ecological progress ... cleaning up "severe environmental pollution .. of "vital importance to the people's well-being and China's future."
China's outgoing President Hu Jintao

All developed countries have had their flirtation with the realization that industrial compounds and chemicals whose effluent are treated as readily disposable are capable of causing great threats to human health.

Japan's minamata disease that afflicted Japanese residents of Minamata as a result of pollution from methylmercury runoff from a chemical plant, was also reflected in Canada in the First Nations reserves of Grassy Narrows and White Dog in northwestern Ontario from mercury originating from a chemical and pulp mill in Dryden, Ontario.

The resulting scandal in both countries from mercury contamination awakened the public conscience and the governments to action and a determination to avoid any such further contamination, as both a blight on the environment and a direct threat to peoples' health from eating fish and shellfish that contained mercury, leading to mercury contamination and a dreadful spiral toward death.

Japanese scientists identified the similarities in both instances and helped the Government of Canada to understand the consequences of unrestrained environmental chemical dumping. The mercury problem was identified in 1969, and in 1970 the government ordered Reed Paper to stop releasing mercury into the water system and closed the local fishery.

In developing countries of the world like India and China there is less regard for the health and safety of people because the focus is on economic and industrial development over all other considerations.  Which explains why India remains one of the few countries of the world that continues to use asbestos in its industrial construction, the use of which directly impacts the health of those using the cancer-causing material.

In Houwanggezhuang village there is a chemical factory, the Beijing Xitao Technology Development Company.  By night the villagers say, the factory pumps foul-odoured fumes into the air.  "Quite a few people have had cancer in recent years.  We don't know the details.  The villagers got cancer one by one and then died one by one," whisper the villagers to those making enquiries.

The village is located roughly 64 kilometres northeast of central Beijing.  And it has seen a spike in cancer-related deaths.  They suspect it is related to the pollution  from the factory.  They speak of Houwanggezhuang as "a village shrouded in the shadow of cancer".  And they have informed The Beijing News that the factory's air and water emissions had turned the local river black.

Houwanggezhuang has a cancer death rate double that of the national average.  Something must be responsible for that dread statistic.  At the 18th Communist Party Congress to select new leaders held in Beijing last week, environment minister Zhou Shengxian announced China is set to begin assessing "social risk" involved of major projects in recognition of anti-pollution protests.

A Chinese environmental magazine, Diqiu, wrote of Houwanggerzhuang citizens developing new cancer cases.  Those afflicted suffering from lung, throat, stomach and liver cancers, are increasingly young, according to the magazine report.  The London Daily Telegraph on Monday decided to visit Houwanggezhuang to learn on their own about the plight of the village.

"You are not welcome here", they were informed by a man wearing a police uniform.  But not before one villager told them that the factory which produces polyacrylamides, a polymer used to make food packaging and to treat sewage - continued to "burn waste" in the middle of the night, with a resulting "strong smell" lingering in the atmosphere afterward.

"We don't know if the chemical factory has caused the cancer, but everyone knows that chemical factories should be located far away from villages."  The film crew was soon confronted with men arriving wearing armbands that read "Security Patrol Volunteers".  One of them attempted to grab a photographer's camera, knocking the man's glasses off and stamping on them.

"Just leave now or you might be beaten and bitten by dogs", one of the men who appeared to be a leader warned, then made an attempt to seize a camera from a reporter before they were all chased back to their car.  The Daily Telegraph vehicle was surrounded, as some of the patrol volunteers tried to force the locked doors open.

Eventually the improvised blockade was cleared at the arrival of the police and someone claiming to be the factory chief.

"If we promote economic growth without environmental protection, it is like draining all the water from a pond and then trying to go fishing in that pond", said China's environmental minister Zhou, at a news conference, following the Congress.