Urban sewage has surpassed industrial waste as China's biggest water polluter, and over 60 per cent of the country's 660 cities are still without urban sewage treatment facilities.

According to Pan Yue, vice-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, urban sewage reached 24.76 billion tons in 2003, accounting for 53.8 per cent of the nation's total waste water. Unfortunately, there are not enough treatment plants operating.

Other reports revealed that pollution in major rivers is grave.

About 38 per cent of the mainstream of the Yellow River is rated as low as Grade 5, at which point water is unfit for any economic purpose, including irrigation.

In the Three Gorges dam area along the Yangtze River, some tributaries have seen a steady decline in water quality.

These circumstances are very painful for a country already lacking sufficient water resources. With many Chinese cities coping with water shortages and millions of people in the vast western regions living on rainwater, man-made pollution is unconscionable.

The pollution control goals of the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05) requires the sewage treatment rate to reach 45 per cent on average and exceed 60 per cent in cities with a population of over 500,000 by 2005. But the rate lingered at 22.3 per cent in 2003.

Among the 2,418 projects designed for water pollution control, only 777 have been completed and 673 are under way. The rest, or 40 per cent, have not even been launched.

Even among the completed ones, some are left unused due to the lack of facilities such as a sewage collection pipe network.

Some local governments' blindness in solely pursuing economic growth, which led to insufficiency of investment and failure in phasing out outdated techniques and polluting companies, is the major culprit. Thus a system to evaluate officials with effective environmental protection as an important index, or the "green GDP (gross domestic product) assessment" becomes vital.

More funds must be allocated for the construction of treatments facilities and to get the completed ones operating at full capacity.

(China Daily July 9, 2004)