Chinese village with a deadly story

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By Daniel Griffiths BBC News, China

China is the world's fourth largest economy, but with the boom have come problems, not least for the environment. Shangba's green fields mask serious environmental problems

I have always thought of China not as one country but several - all crammed in behind one enormous border.

There is the dry, dusty north giving way to the dark, silent forests that stretch towards Russia. Then there are the deserts, mountains and rushing rivers of the far west.

There are the soft bamboo groves, and endless rice fields of the centre. And, as if that was not enough, there is the south.

The south has so many of these features but also blinding colours: bright red earth, then layer upon layer of every shade of green imaginable, rising up to the acid blue sky beyond.

The air is always thick and hot, full of the thunderstorms to come.

Small town

It was like that the day I arrived in Shangba.

You will not find Shangba on many maps, even Chinese ones.

It is a tiny hamlet - a little jumbled collection of small whitewashed houses with wooden roofs, sitting in the lush green paddy fields and hills of southern China.

A water buffalo meandered down what passed for the main street. The occasional motorbike chuck-chucked past, the driver staring at me for as long as possible before having to turn his eyes back to the road.

Things happen slowly in Shangba, I thought.

In Chinese history, poets and philosophers retreated to remote, beautiful backwaters to contemplate the world and put their thoughts to paper. I imagined this might be the sort of place high on their list.

Shangba sounds idyllic, but it hides a deadly story.

There is a broad river running to the side of the village - its shallow waters rippling over smooth stones.

For years locals relied on the river for drinking water, and to irrigate their crops.

Now, though, many of those same people are dying of cancer. This small hamlet has joined the ranks of what China's media calls the country's "cancer villages."

Toxic waste

Villagers say the water is polluted and blame the mineral mines further upstream for dumping toxic waste into the river.

Villagers believe their water has been poisonedThere is a thick red residue on the riverbank and walking along the little paths that wind their way through the fields outside the village I saw streams that were a rusty orange.

Out there among the rice paddies I met scientist Chen Nengchang.

A stocky, cheery man, flanked by two young assistants, he has spent years studying pollution in the river. He believes there is a direct connection between incidences of cancer and the mines in the area.

Over the years he has recorded levels of heavy metals and toxins in the water way above national averages. He says they could only have come from the waste produced by the mining process.

But for many villagers his research comes too late.

Sitting outside her small house in the waning afternoon sun, her face brown and weathered after years out in the fields, Wang Yan told me how she lost her mother and husband to cancer last year.

"The disease destroyed them," she said. "They just got weaker and weaker until they couldn't go on any longer. Now I am left here trying to get by as best I can and look after the children."

"I get help from other people here," she told me "and I can work the fields, but it's a struggle to survive."And she is not alone. Villager after villager, story after story. It is the same.

Coming to grips

The man trying to deal with all this is local party official, He Shouming.

In the rush to get rich, factories, mines and farms have ignored environmental guidelines and are dumping toxic chemicals and untreated sewage into rivers and lakes His office looked as though it had not changed for decades.

A large yellowing poster of Chairman Mao on one wall, photos of old comrades long gone on the other.

Mr He has been a Communist for decades - a decent man who's struggling to come to grips with a party that he says has lost touch with many Chinese people.

"We have appealed to the mine owners and to senior officials in the party to stop this," he told me, "but so far nothing has happened.

"I have one family of three young children who have lost their mother and father. Our rice crops have failed because of the polluted water. What am I supposed to do? We can't afford to move, so we are stuck here."

This is a situation repeated across China.

Some 320 million people drink polluted water every day.

In the rush to get rich, factories, mines and farms have ignored environmental guidelines and are dumping toxic chemicals and untreated sewage into rivers and lakes - making China's waterways some of the most polluted in the world.

Growing discontent

Public anger is growing, so what is the government doing?

Well, there is the State Environmental Protection Administration (or SEPA), but it is a weak organisation, powerless to act in the face of provincial officials who are more interested in doing deals with big companies that will bring jobs and money.

The reality is that the government is having to play catch-up. Beijing has promised to take action.

Last year the government pledged to spend billions of pounds to bring clean water to 160 million farmers by 2010.

But in such a populous country even that would still leave many more without fresh supplies - and previous plans to clean up some of the country's most polluted rivers have come to nothing.

The reality is that the government is having to play catch-up.

For the past three decades, successive administrations have put economic growth ahead of the environment.

Now it is Mrs Wang and Mr He, the residents of Shangba, and of thousands of other cancer villages up and down the country who are paying the price.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 25 January, 2007 at 1100 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.