China says polluters getting official protection
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-06-02 19:11

BEIJING - China handled more than 200 cases of local governments protecting polluters last year as it struggles to balance environmental concerns with development, an official said on Thursday.
The environment had suffered over two decades of economic reform, a condensed form of the problem which developed countries faced over 100 years or so, the State Environmental Protection Administration official said.

"Local protectionism is a big headache for the environmental protection administration," the organization's vice minister, Wang Jirong, told a news conference in Beijing which is struggling to clean up its air before it hosts the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

China, the world's top coal producer and consumer, is already the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases.

Nearly three-quarters of the Yellow River, which supplies water to 12 percent of China's 1.3 billion people and 15 percent of its farmland, had been badly tainted by sewage, industrial waste, fertilizer and other pollutants, Xinhua news agency said last week.

China is facing a severe water crisis -- 300 million people do not have access to drinkable water -- and the government has been spending heavily to clean major waterways like the Yellow, Huaihe and Yangtze rivers.

But those clean-up campaigns have made limited progress because of spotty enforcement and uncooperative industry.

"The appearance of China's environmental problems has been condensed. The problems that gradually came up in developed countries over more than 100 years, have come up all together in China in the past 20 years or so," Wang said.

In recent years, the administration has seen a surge of about 30 percent a year in the number of complaints about the environment, said Wang Yuqing, another vice minister.

"First, I am happy to say, is that the environmental consciousness of the people has risen a lot," he said.

Local government inability or unwillingness to enforce regulations was another reason, he said.

All but one of 23 power plant projects ordered suspended due to violations of environmental procedures had got the green light to resume construction, Wang Yuqing said.

In January, the administration asked 30 major infrastructure projects around the country, including 23 power stations with total capacity of nearly 32 gigawatts, to halt construction because they flouted a law requiring environmental impact assessments before work began.