According to state-run media reports, China’s Yangtze River is so polluted that the damage may be irreversible.
China’s massive Yangtze river, a lifeline for tens of millions of people, is seriously polluted and the damage is almost irreversible, a state-run newspaper said Monday.
More than 370 miles of the river are in critical condition and almost 30 percent of its major tributaries are seriously polluted, the China Daily said, citing a report by the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The pollution, along with damming and heavy use of boats, has caused a sharp decline in aquatic life along the Yangtze.
The report said the annual harvest of aquatic products from the river has dropped from 427,000 tons in the 1950s to about 100,000 tons in the 1990s.
“The impact of human activities on the Yangtze water ecology is largely irreversible,” Yang Guishan, a researcher at the institute, was quoted as saying.
You have to wonder that if this is the extent of the damage that the Party-controlled media is willing to report, how bad must the damage really be?
At any rate, this report, along with many similar reports, just goes to show how wretched the pollution situation in China really is. Additionally, if you couple these reports about pollution with my colleague Dr. Joyner’s earlier post regarding how the economic situation in China may be overstated, and add to the mix growth in gender population disparity, growth in Muslim terrorism, and growth in the availability of information about the west, and you have to wonder–just how stable is China’s current government, anyway? Most of China’s major problems, simply taken singularly, would be enough to take down a lot of governments.
