According to the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs – a Beijing-based NGO – of these sites, just 35 per cent have water of good quality, another 32 per cent are suitable for water supply, 20 per cent are suitable for industrial or agricultural use – but not for human contact – and 13 per cent are useless.
The problem is that the environmental legacy of China’s industrialisation affects everyone, not just Chinese people.
Often these objectives are set in Five Year Plans that set quantitative targets for water quality.
Drinking water standards, wastewater treatment, and pollution control all received attention, in order to reduce water pollution by 30 to 50 per cent.
The Plan aims to enforce stricter standards, increase water monitoring efforts, strengthen the enforcement of environmental laws, punish polluters and especially target heavily polluting industries.
These initiatives suggest that the Chinese government is serious about tackling water pollution.
But in an interesting innovation, the Law on Environmental Protection was modified in 2014 to strengthen mechanisms for the release of data, following which the Ministry of Environmental Protection began to use citizen participation as a means of improving environmental monitoring and governance.
The Ministry also maintains a WeChat account, onto which citizens can upload photographs of rivers that they consider excessively polluted; the Ministry promises to respond to such reports and to add the data to the national list of highly polluted rivers.