Climate change treaty didn't apply to China.
Cancer-Stricken Chinese Village Tries to Pierce a Wall of Silence
_____Special Report_____
• China's Restive Rural Regions
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By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A19
DRAGON RANGE, China -- The first to die was the carpenter, Li Yanfu. His neighbor, a middle-aged mother named Kong Qianhua, succumbed next, just before the autumn harvest. The wheat farmer, Feng Chentian, passed away three months later.
Those cancer deaths in 1974 hardly seemed suspicious at the time. But over the next 27 years, almost every family in this tiny hamlet high in the mountains of central China would lose someone to cancer. Tumors developed in young and old, in livers, lungs, throats and stomachs. The disease struck some households more than once, killing couples, siblings and, in one case, father, mother and son.
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With each death, the people of Dragon Range asked why their village suffered so much while others nearby appeared unaffected. Some residents whispered about an ancient curse. Others fled homes that had been in their families for centuries. Parents urged children to leave and never come back.
Only recently did the villagers begin to suspect their woes might be linked to the plumes of smoke billowing from factories in the valley below, that they might be victims of environmental damage done by China's headlong drive for economic growth. And then they tried to do something about it.
What happened next highlights the vitality of an emerging civil society in China -- individuals and groups trying to operate outside the control of the Communist Party-run state. But it also illustrates the limits to what Chinese citizens can achieve in a political system that remains rigidly authoritarian.
An elected village chief distributed a petition. A young reporter defied an editor. An environmentalist volunteered to collect soil samples. An independent-minded scientist found carcinogens in the samples. Finally, a member of the all-powerful Politburo took notice and ordered an investigation.
But then, nothing changed. The factories outside Dragon Range continue to operate. The villagers continue to die.
"So many people have passed away. They were all so healthy, and they all died so quickly," lamented Wan Haichao, 63, whose wife died of lung cancer five years ago and whose children have moved away. "So of course, we are angry. But what can we do? We are helpless because we have no power."
At first glance, the residents of Dragon Range seem unlikely victims of industrial pollution. Here in the Qin Mountains, about 600 miles southwest of Beijing, people cultivate lush fields of corn and wheat carved into the mountainside like stairs. Walnuts and orange-red persimmons dangle from the trees, and wild pigs scamper around at night.
But at the edge of town, villagers can see four factories in the valley to the north: two fertilizer plants, a radio plant and a steel mill. The radio plant is owned by the military, and the three others are owned by local governments. Villagers welcomed these factories when they opened, the first in the late 1960s and the last in the 1980s. To them, the factories meant workers. And workers meant customers to buy their crops.
But now, people here have a different view. They talk about the smokestacks and what poisons they might be spewing into the air. They debate wind patterns and whether Dragon Range's position on the mountain, higher than the other villages, puts it more directly in pollution's path. And they ask: Where else could the high levels of arsenic and lead found in their soil be coming from?
"In the mornings, you can smell it in the air and you can sometimes see the fields covered with ashes," said Li Anglao, 40, whose parents both died of cancer. "It's frightening. If you get sick now, you know it's going to be cancer."
According to village records, 59 of the 154 people who lived in Dragon Range in 1974 have died. Thirty-six of those deaths, or more than 60 percent, were caused by cancer. By comparison, in one village adjacent to Dragon Range, only two people have died of cancer in the past 30 years, residents said. Nationally, cancer accounts for 15 percent to 19 percent of deaths in rural China.
Chinese researchers say Dragon Range's problems are not unique. Rapid economic growth over the past two decades has lifted millions of Chinese out of poverty, extending life expectancy and reducing infant mortality, but it has also resulted in a monumental environmental crisis. China suffers from some of the world's most polluted air and water, and it is only beginning to understand the impact on public health.
In scattered cities and villages across the country, researchers have linked pollution to higher rates of cancer, lung disease, intestinal ailments, miscarriages and birth defects. A 1999 government report estimated the total health costs of air and water pollution in China to be more than $46 billion annually, or nearly 7 percent of gross domestic product.
These environmental problems have led to a surge of grass-roots activism, in the form of petitions, lawsuits, demonstrations and even blockades of factories. Such activity would have led to swift jail terms as recently as the 1970s, but Beijing is more tolerant of environmental protests now, as long as they are not too disruptive.
In effect, the Communist Party wants to use these protests to pressure local officials who violate environmental laws. But the party also tries to limit the scope of independent citizen action to ensure its grip on power cannot be challenged.
In Dragon Range, the environmental activism began with a village election. Candidates in these elections are often picked by party officials, but the villagers here elected someone on their own: a 44-year-old farmer named Wan Yinggong, whose father had recently died of cancer.
Wan took office in 1994 and began digging new wells for the village. But people kept dying of cancer, and the new patients were getting younger. When two villagers were diagnosed with tumors in January 2000, one of them a woman in her thirties, Wan called a community meeting. All 30 families in the village attended, and they agreed unanimously to draft a petition demanding an investigation and relocation of the village if necessary.
Wan found a lawyer to help him write the petition. Three months later he sent it to the county government and several local newspapers. That led to the first of several visits to Dragon Range by government officials who collected water and food samples, promised action, then never returned.
The government-controlled media were not much help either. But one small newspaper in the nearby city of Xian did publish a report about Dragon Range. The writer then called a friend in Beijing, another reporter named Zhang Yi.
Unlike many Chinese journalists, Zhang, 28, is committed to the notion that reporters should help the weak and expose government wrongdoing. Dragon Range was just the kind of story he became a journalist to pursue.
Although he worked for the Beijing Youth Daily, a newspaper with a reputation for daring to print articles critical of the government, Zhang knew his editor would be nervous about a story such as Dragon Range. So he made plans to travel there independently. When he proposed the story, his editor said no. But Zhang insisted and said he would cover the cost of the trip himself. The editor backed down.
"He was worried the subject was too sensitive. But I think if a story isn't sensitive, it's not worth writing," Zhang said. "And when I wrote the story, he said he liked it."
Indeed, the article was a sensation. Suddenly Dragon Range became known as "Cancer Village," and reporters from around the country followed Zhang's lead.
Readers, meanwhile, flooded Zhang with calls. Among them was a young environmental activist named Lin Yi. Zhang put him in touch with another concerned caller, a scientist named Lin Jinxing. The two men talked, and Lin Yi agreed to bring back water, soil and food samples from Dragon Range for the scientist to analyze.
"I was moved by the situation, and I wanted to do something to help," said Lin Yi, 28, a freelance writer who volunteers with one of Beijing's largest environmental groups, Friends of Nature. "Our government says it is the people's government. I think that means ordinary people can have responsibilities too."
Lin Yi traveled to Dragon Range on a holiday, braving a storm that nearly washed out the winding mountain road to the village. He returned three days later with samples of water, flour, beans, potatoes, persimmons and soil.
Lin Jinxing, a scholar with the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, examined the samples and discovered levels of lead and arsenic in the flour and soil far exceeding safety standards. When he called Dragon Range with the results, it was the first time anyone had provided the village with solid information about what might be causing the cancer. Beijing Youth Daily reported his findings, the first time results of any of the many tests conducted in Dragon Range were made public.
Then, in May this year, a writer for the official New China News Agency filed a report on Dragon Range for internal circulation among the Chinese leadership. Deputy Prime Minister and Politburo member Wen Jiabao read the article and ordered the State Environmental Protection Agency to investigate, according to two central government sources.
The investigators visited in June. Like others before them, they collected soil and food samples. And like others before them, they have not shared the results of their tests with the villagers.
There has been no word about whether the factories near Dragon Range have been tested or required to clean up their operations. Nor has there been any real response to the village's demand for relocation. Residents here suspect county officials could be ignoring orders from above and misusing funds intended to provide them with new homes and fields.
"If the county wants to solve the problem, it can solve the problem," said Wan, the village chief. "If there's pollution, can it be cleaned up? If not, can we move? All of this should be simple. But they make it so hard."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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