To demonstrate people power, Mao was drawn to Henan. During the Great Leap Forward, this was the home of the first people’s commune and the boldest agricultural experiments.13 In 1958—the year that saw the height of Maoist excess—no province went further in applying Soviet-inspired techniques of close planting and deep plowing, or in falsely claiming success.14 Doctored propaganda images of the era show wheatfields so dense that children could stand on the crop. The slogan of the age was “Learn from Henan. Catch up with Henan!” The reality two years later was a famine that killed up to 8 million people in this province alone.15 In the worst affected area of Xinyang, corpses littered the fields.16 Some desperate people resorted to cannibalism.17 In 1961, an internal party document reportedly described what happened as a “holocaust.” Officially the nationwide death toll was 14 million. Historians now estimate between 20 and 40 million people starved to death.
That was not the only way people died. The reckless pace of hydro-logical engineering of the time, mentioned in chapter 2, was particularly calamitous here. In 1958, a nationwide frenzy of dam building reached its peak in Henan, where a population of farmers was mobilized to build 110 dams in a single year.18 A decade later, more than half had collapsed, killing countless people. Others lasted longer, though with direr consequences: in 1975, the worst dam disaster in China’s history killed around 240,000 people in Henan’s Zhumadian prefecture.19
Many of these calamities had common causes: a belief that more people meant more power, unrealistically high expectations of the land’s fertility, and regional party lackeys who took their leader’s wildest plans to absurd extremes, lied about results, then silenced any critic who dared to reveal the truth.20 After 1978, much the same could be said of the embrace of dirty industry and reckless get-rich-quick schemes that were touted as the best way to lift Henan’s huge population out of poverty.
We drove east, through the haze, across the floodplains to one of the worst-affected areas. The Huai River basin is home to 150 million people who live among its tangle of tributaries and irrigation canals. Near Henan’s border with Anhui Province, the villages here were crushed together, along with the people. Junctions were strewn with rubbish, and wider social problems were evident from a giant billboard depicting an emaciated man and a screaming entreaty: “Don’t use drugs!” More people migrated from these two provinces than almost anywhere else in China.21 It was the human pool that filled cities like Shanghai with cheap labor. There was little reason to stay. This area was often deluged by floods. In the postreform era, it had also become synonymous with pollution and sickness.22
During the eighties and nineties, poor but venal local governments in the Huai valley were in such a rush to industrialize that they accepted and protected heavily polluting companies, such as paper mills, tanneries, and chemical plants. It was a huge risk to the health of the population, though perhaps not fully understood at the time.
Local governments did not want to miss out on the economic development that was making other parts of China rich. Environment protection officials joined “investment soliciting delegations” to promise industries that they would not face the tight controls seen in richer areas.23 Outside companies were willing to invest, to provide jobs, and—almost certainly—bribes. Many were joint ventures with multinationals that could not get approval to site their production in countries with more stringent environmental standards. Among the worst culprits was Lianhua (Lotus) Gourmet Powder Company—a joint venture between the local government and Japan’s Ajinomoto—which was China’s biggest producer of monosodium glutamate food flavoring. Every day the plant discharged 120,000 tons of wastewater. Pollution slicks of up to 70 kilometers in length were common. The Ying, a Huai tributary lauded by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai for “crystal clear” headwaters, became a cesspool.
Almost 100 “cancer villages” have been identified in China, most of them near polluted waterways. From the mid-1990s, pioneering Chinese journalists began investigating a belt of them along the Huai River basin. Reliable information was hard to come by, locals were often intimidated, and many NGO officials and reporters were reluctant to talk on the record. Before my trip, a Chinese journalist advised me not to visit because it might put people in jeopardy. “After I published my story, my sources were constantly harassed by local public security officers. I wish I had never written the piece,” he told me.
Another journalist, Deng Fei, has mapped those affected villages.24 The scientific basis for the cancer village tag is mixed. There have been few epidemiological studies and much of the evidence is anecdotal. But at the very least, these villages can be considered clusters of fear. Such concerns are well founded. Nationally, cancer rates rose rapidly after the launch of economic reforms, and in 1997, this disease became the main cause of death in China for the first time. It causes one in five deaths, up 80 percent over the past thirty years. Lung cancer, caused by smoking and air pollution, is the biggest killer. Diseases of the digestive system—associated with water pollution and food contamination—have also risen sharply.25 Worst affected are the 700 million people living in the countryside, who are poorer and less likely to have access to piped, treated water than urban dwellers. Compared with the global average, Chinese farmers are almost four times more likely to die of liver cancer and twice as likely to die of stomach cancer. Environmental standards are dire in many areas, but nowhere else has a worse reputation than the Huai River basin. Anecdotal or not, the locals have solid reasons to be fearful.
In the poor district of Xiangcheng City, the residents living between a coal-fired power plant and the Lianhua factory were not sure whether to worry more about the polluted air or the contaminated water they had been breathing and drinking for a large part of their lives. For much of the previous twenty years another Huai tributary, the Yun, that ran near to their homes had been choked with chemicals, while the air above, they said, had been tinted green on the smoggiest days. At the local industrial primary school, everything from windowsills to the leaves on the trees was coated in fine black dust. A cleanup was finally under way, but for many it was too late.
“The rich folk have already moved out. Just a couple of hundred families remain. It has become a slum,” said one local woman. “Among those left behind, almost everyone over the age of forty has some kind of disease … We have complained about the pollution but no one cares. Our county is too remote and too poor.”
Many residents in this sprawl of wide gray streets believed the pollution was deadly. A short distance downstream at Shi Zhuang Village, a factory worker named Shi Yingzhong was mourning the death of his father from cancer the previous year. The illness had brought financial disaster to an already poor family, which was now saddled with crippling medical bills. Shi’s share of the outstanding debt ran to about 25,000 yuan—a huge sum for a man who earned just 1,000 yuan per month. His wife received even less for her work on the family’s fields.
Shi was resigned rather than angry, but he had no doubt about the cause of his father’s death. “It was the polluted water,” he said. “We used to drink from a well just four meters deep. Then the water became dirty so we had to go deeper and deeper. Now it is more than forty meters, but the water is still not clean.”
Yet many locals remembered a time not so long ago when the Huai was considered a blessed river. Perhaps the most famous of them is Huo Daishan, who has led the battle again pollution in Henan.
Huo smiled as he recalled nearly drowning in the Huai as a three-year-old. “There were lots of kids diving in the river and swimming around. It looked really exciting so I decided to join in. In I went, then down, down under the water thinking ‘Isn’t this fun!’ Especially after a little while when I could see a blaze of lights in my head. Only later did I realize this meant I had fallen into a coma.”
He came to love the river that nearly killed him. During his childhood in the 1950s it was a source of drinking water, irrigation for the fields, fish for the table, and, once he had properly learned to swim, fun. There was romance too. His grandmother took him to a nighttime wedding ceremony on the water. As musicians played and fireworks were set off from brightly illuminated boats, the bride was rowed in from one side and the groom— stripped down to his shorts with just a red ribbon in his hair—had to dance his way slowly across the water from the other direction, his swaying movements the only source of power for the boat. “It was extraordinarily beautiful,” recalled Huo. “Even in films, I have never seen anything like it.”
That cultural tradition disappeared. The population grew, the economy changed, and so did the river. By the mid-1980s, the banks of the Huai were punctuated with factories. In 1987, when Huo was assigned to photograph the river near his childhood home, the waters were black. It stank. Dead fish floated on the surface. The silk trader’s son lacked the vocabulary to describe what had happened. “Back then, we didn’t even know the word ‘pollution.’”
Locals expressed the change in aphorisms and songs. The people of this area are proud of their cultural heritage. When they are happy, they write ditties and wistful ballads. When sad, they do not just grumble, they sing lamentations. In the late 1950s, this literary talent was channeled into propaganda slogans for their homeland.
“Though you may walk thousands of miles, you will never find beauty to compare to the Huai River” went
