Toxic Tunnels: Guangzhou's Polluted Canals

In the shallow blackened waters of the Pearl River Basin, the daily wash of chemicals and sewage float from canal to sea. At the end of 2008, the Guangzhou provincial government allocated 48.6 billion yuan to improve the canal water's quality within 18 months. The mayor at the time, Zhang Guangning, currently the party secretary of the Guangzhou Municipal Committee, promised that district leaders would be able to swim in the rivers after the canal cleaning project. Now after two years and hundreds of millions of yuan, the canals are still slicked over with oily resin and the water, putrid-smelling.

The rivers and canals running throughout Guangzhou city have become more polluted in recent years. In a rapidly growing city, waterways have become the city's central waste discharge channel and sewer. When Guangzhou resident Li Pingri looks out the window of his home at the Qigang Tributary, he sees motionless sludge-covered water. Li said, "The 48.6 billion yuan debt will take years to pay off. To think we could have changed it within a year and a half was unrealistic."

Down the Drain

In the 1960s, Guangzhou's rivers were clean enough to swim in and clear enough for fishes to thrive, according to the 79-year-old Li. But since the 1970s, the effects of industrialization and urbanization crept in and the population of the nearby cities increased exponentially. The 231 rivers and canals similar to the Qigang Brook surrounding downtown Guangzhou became choked with silt and the fish and shrimp vanished.

Residents of Guangzhou have publicly complained about the lack of funding for canal management. But at the end of 2008, the city government issued an ambitious plan to improve the water's quality before the opening of the Asian Games in November of 2011. The 48.6 billion yuan investment accounted for more than half of Guangzhou's 62.2 billion yuan in total income for 2008. Local media reports cast the decision in a doubtful light, charging city authorities with the claim that it was disposing of 100 million yuan in one day.

Li initially greeted the city government's huge investment in water management with tremendous excitement. He sent a letter to the mayor praising the government's resolve in addressing the water quality of the canal. But since then, he has become an advocate for canal management by sending letters to the mayor highlighting the growing problems with water quality and publishing articles in newspapers.

Today, Guangzhou has completed 38 new sewage treatment plants, which will bring the city's sewage treatment rate to 81 percent. Guangzhou is also working on a water diversion and replenishment project that will use water from the Pearl River to improve natural cleansing of upstream discharges in the city's rivers and canals.

Ouyang Ming, Deputy Director of the Guangzhou Water Management Authority, says with the efforts of the past 18 months, the water management projects are almost complete. "More and more rivers and canals have been improved and the results of the water management projects have become more apparent," according to Ouyang. However, many Guangzhou residents disagree. Nearly one half of the respondents to an internet survey run by the Guangzhou Daily Newspaper said that they were not satisfied with the results of the recent water management projects.

Avoiding the Bottom

Professor Cheng Xiaohong of the Water Resources and Environment Research Center at Sun Yat-Sen University argues that improving the water quality in Huangpu Creek would require a staggering amount of investment. Cheng said, "Using a pump to draw up the water to wash the river bed would be astronomically expensive, and in the long run, that would be unsustainable."

Chen has studied the area's previous attempts to clean the canal water. While some of the water management projects have produced cleaner water in some of the main rivers, the benefits are often fleeting, and Guangzhou has many small canal branches that are not included in the current water management project, according to Chen. Polluted water from the river branches flow back into the main canals when rainstorms hit.

Stronger Currents

In the midst of the area's frenetic pace of development, residents living alongside Guangzhou's canals are not only the receivers of the polluted water's harmful effects, but also the source. Professor Chen has seen many new buildings go up with dozens of sewage discharges running right into the canals. The pipes spew drainage water from showers, toilets and laundry floor drains.

With the Asian Games approaching, residents and officials have become more anxious to address the still-stinking canals surrounding the city. Some officials have suggested that they use chemical methods to clean the water in a short time, if only to have a mild improvement in water quality during the Games. But Li said this approach is unacceptable simply because the chemicals have the potential to increase the toxicity of the water. He suggests a method that would involve pumping more water from the main body of the Pearl River to Qingyuan, Foshan, Nanhai and other Pearl River Delta cities.

Dr. Wang Shugong, a water expert from the Research Center of Earth Environment and Resources at Sun Yat-Sen University said although many problems remain for Guangzhou's water management, the single most important achievement is the newfound concern for the quality of the water. The tides of Guangzhou's waterways have been large obstacles in the water-cleaning project, in comparison to inland cities with a single running waterway, a unique set of standards must be set for the Pearl River Delta cities. If anything, Wang said, the expensive program reflects public concern for the future of the area's water supplies. "At least the Guangzhou government has already started it. It took 15 years to see results of Suzhou River management in Shanghai."