China Environmental Law

The Pearl River stretch which flows through Guangzhou has been polluted by “dirty and disgusting black water from an upper river branch,” reports the Yangcheng Evening News. 

No hyperbole here; that river is running black:

This problem has occurred on several occasions over the last two years, but “there are still no convincing explanations as to how that happens and what the pollutants are despite continuous complaints and some so-called official investigations.” 

The so-called “local environmental protection bureau” has been less than worthless in the opinion of our correspondent who reports that “they said, [the pollution] was caused by dirty black silt dredged up from the river bed when a power plant discharged its waste along that upper branch river it sits by, but the extended period of pollution weakened this explanation.”

I’ve got to second that opinion.  What “waste” was a power plant discharging into the river?  Do they wash coal?  I doubt it. 

But Mr. or Ms. Reporter, get out there and track down the source.  You’ve been encouraged by none other than the Mayor of Guangzhou to get tough on polluters. 

It was reported that in a speech made in July

“before thousands of swimmers ventured across the Pearl River on Saturday, Mayor Zhang encouraged more media coverage of environmental problems in the Pearl River Delta. He said: “The more the media nitpick, the more we can get people behind the effort to clean up the Pearl River.”

Go forth and nitpick.  How hard it is to find the source of a black river?