When a Billion Chinese Jump

one. “When we have a good harvest by the Huai River, no one in the entire country will go hungry” ran another.

Forty years later, with the river filthy and the land contaminated, the wordsmiths turned out more cynical lines:

In the fifties, we washed our food in the clear river,

In the sixties, we irrigated our fields with its waters,

In the seventies, we saw our river turn black and oily,

In the eighties, we watched dead fish float to the surface,

In the nineties, we too started to fall sick.

The government knew a catastrophe was taking place and tried to act. In 1995, the country’s first river environment protection law was enacted to clean up the Huai. The ranking State Council member for the environment, Song Jian, proclaimed boldly, “We must be ready to sever our limbs when bitten by a poisonous snake,” to show his willingness to sacrifice polluting industries. But the local government had other ideas. They were not going to abandon companies like Lianhua, which employed 8,000 people and had the host city as a majority stakeholder. The cleanup campaign proved only that laws in China are easy to ignore and rhetoric is often the opposite of reality. Lianhua continued to dump ammonium nitrate. Tanneries and chemical firms discharged other pollutants. The black slicks grew longer and fouler. At the peak, the stench grew so noxious that children at nearby schools had to wear masks in the classroom. A sharp rise in tumor cases prompted Huo—then working for the China Environment Daily—to coin the phrase aizheng cun (cancer village). Soon similar clusters of disease were being identified up and down the river. Downstream in Anhui Province, the deadly impact on health was exposed by independent journalist Chen Guidi in his article “Warning of Huai River.”

Others followed. Soon the names of the Henan cancer villages—Mengzhi, Sunying, Chenkou, Dachu, Duying, Huangmengying, Xiditou—were notorious across the country.²⁶ Along stretches of the river, the cancer rate was more than twice the national average, but locals had no choice but to drink the stinking water. They would boil it, then skim the scum off the top, but the metallic taste never left. Huo says the calamity hit home hardest when his friend, a local village chief, was struck with cancer after downing a liter of contaminated well water in a bid to prove to locals that he was willing to take the same risks as them.

As late as 2004, the state environmental protection agency was insisting the Huai had been cleaned up. Living by a river that was still evidently foul, locals responded with a new slogan: “We have filthy officials and filthy water. For clean water, we need clean officials.”

Huo switched from journalist to activist, exposing factories that were secretly discharging wastewater in the night, and mocking officials who spoke of a cleanup. It was a dangerous move. His family started to get death threats. One day, on his way home from taking pictures of the Lianhua factory, he was beaten up by thugs.

But the media attention was starting to pay off. In 2004, the leaders of the four worst-affected provinces along the Huai agreed to new controls for wastewater. Dozens of factories were closed. The Henan government spent 325 million yuan on drilling 700 new wells into superdeep aquifers. Even the Lianhua MSG factory had cleaned up. It was such a model that other factories were told to copy its example. When I visited the Huai several years later it was no longer black. It did not stink. Some brave souls had even resumed fishing. The subject of cancer, however, remains sensitive. In 2007, the World Bank issued a preliminary report suggesting 750,000 people die each year from pollution in China. This figure was removed from the published document at the urging of the government. It did not even include cancer deaths.²⁷

At Mengjian Village I ducked into a courtyard house to talk to a local farming family, who described how the disease had ravaged their community. “Everyone knew someone who had cancer. But now there is a big change. It is like two different worlds. The environment is much better,” said Mr. Wang, the head of the family. He credited the government for drilling a well into a safe deep aquifer 500 meters below the surface. The old well, 30 meters deep, is still contaminated. “A frog would die if it jumped in there for even a second,” he said.

Others told a similar story. The old problem of water contamination had been replaced by a new one of water scarcity. Pressure from a growing population and expanding industry had resulted in overuse and contamination of rivers and shallow wells across northern China. The deep aquifers could only be a temporary solution. They are a nonrenewable resource, like oil. Pumped at huge cost, they led to subsidence and—if close to the sea—intrusion by brackish water.²⁸ This meant more stress on the land. Already under intense pressure from above, it was now being sucked dry down below.

Environmental stress was to blame for the prejudice directed toward people in Henan, according to Yan Lianke, Henan’s most famous modern wordsmith. The controversial author was the master of dark, absurdist fiction inspired by the deterioration of his homeland. Yan began his writing career as a military author employed by the People’s Liberation Army to pen morale-boosting stories for the troops. Instead, his first novel, Xia Riluo (1994), related the tale of two military heroes who steadily debased themselves. Yan was thrown out of the army in 2004 after publishing Shouhuo (Enjoyment), which satirized the bizarre wealth-creation schemes of many local governments. In that award-winning novel, desperate county officials in Henan were so short of resources that the only way they could think of developing their economy was to set up a freak show and buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia as an attraction for the growing “Red tourism” market. More scandalous still was Yan’s next work, Serve the People, which was banned altogether in China. This was not surprising given the plot, which revolved around a Cultural Revolution–era affair between an army officer’s wife and her lover, who smashed up images of Mao Zedong and urinated on his little red book to reach new heights of sexual ecstasy.

I met the iconoclast in a bookshop teahouse. He was soft-spoken to the point of shyness, but his eyes blazed with a compassionate fury as he described his latest project: a book about his family in Henan. To understand the turmoil of the past fifty years, he said, it was necessary to look not just at politics and economics but also at the relationship between the environment and people.

He described the changes in his family home in Tianhu, which had swollen since his childhood from a village of 2,000 to a town of 7,000. “The creek that once flowed in front of our home has dried up. The old peach grove has been chopped down. Villagers used to drink from a well three meters deep. Now they go down fifteen and don’t always find water. When the wind blows hard, the sky is filled with so much dust from the nearby cement factory that we have to cover all our belongings with sheets.”

On an individual material level, Yan said this was good. “We live in concrete homes now instead of mud hovels, the roads are tarmac instead of dirt, but when you consider the environment as a whole, there has been severe damage.” And it has affected human health. Every year he heard of more cases of cancer.

Since his childhood, more than 80 percent of the trees in his village had been felled, and even the Yellow River had at times been reduced to a trickle. A still greater loss, he said, was of the tenderness the villagers formerly felt for the earth. “In the past the land was owned by farmers. They could trace it back to their ancestors, so they loved it and cared for it. But now all they have is usage rights. And even those are often taken away when the local government wants to build factories. So farmers take a different view. Now they think, ‘Why not exploit the land so I can improve my life?’”

Yan’s words were reminiscent of what is arguably the greatest novel in English about rural life in China, The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl Buck. Based on the Nobel Prize–winning author’s experience in Anhui (which neighbors Henan) from 1917 to 1920, the book tells the story of a poor hardworking farmer and his wife, who endure famine and urban migration before securing land and making a better life for themselves. Their children, however, do not appreciate the value of the soil and, at the end of the book, scheme to sell it off. This prompts a furious tirade from the father, who loves the soil as if it were his own flesh and blood:

“Now evil, idle son—sell the land! It is the end of a family—when they begin to sell the land. Out of the land we came and into it we must go—if you will hold your land you can live—no one can rob you of land—if