Perhaps there’s hope for China after all

From the New York Times:

On an Ancient Canal, Grunge Gives Way to Grandeur

HANGZHOU, China — Until the early 1990s, crews on barges and boats chugging down China’s 2,400-year-old Grand Canal did not need familiar landmarks to tell them they were approaching the scenic city of Hangzhou.

They could smell it.

“The water was black,” said Zhu Jianbai, assistant director of the city government’s Grand Canal Restoration and Development Group. “There was no life in it. If you lived beside it, you had to live with the stink. It was an embarrassment.”

But a $250 million makeover that began in 2001 has improved water quality and spurred urban renewal along a 24-mile section of this ancient transport artery that once connected China’s great west-to-east river systems, carrying the goods, taxes and official communications that sustained successive dynasties.

Today, small fish swim among the pylons supporting cargo wharves where effluent from factories and raw sewage from homes had poisoned this section of the world’s oldest man-made waterway. Walkways and parkland line sections of the canal, and some of China’s most expensive apartment buildings have sprung up beside it on what has become prime real estate. Water taxis connect historic piers and bridges along the winding route through the city where old shop houses and tenements are being restored.

Most remarkably, the canal no longer smells.

On my two trips across China, covering more than half the country’s provinces, Mr. Zhu’s feelings are close to my own impressions of China. The country had a long and rich history and was potentially beautiful—yet the lack of any environmental conscious made it filthier than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. And in my experience, the environmental condition of China in 2003 was notable worse than other areas I had seen in the former USSR and parts of the Third World.

Yet I always had cause for hope when considering the case of Japan. My late grandfather remembers that in post-war Tokyo, people wore elevated shoes because sewage ran openly in the streets. Today, Tokyo is one of the cleanest capital cities in the world, and Japan as a country is generally very clean. Because countries don’t develop with clean environments—they reach a critical mass of wealth where the population demands certain minimum requirements for hygiene and clean air and water.

Perhaps China can follow Japan’s path, as environmental awareness increases. Hangzhou’s ultimate goal is to persuade the United Nations to list the canal as a UNESCO World Heritage site.