Twisting open bottles of water a daily ritual in China - Nov. 22

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Twisting open bottles of water a daily ritual in China
Miro CernetigVancouver Sun

Wednesday, November 22, 2006


BEIJING -- You think you have a water problem, Vancouver? It's nothing compared to life in this country of 1.3 billion people, where being able to drink water from the tap would be front-page news.

This is the land of bottled water. Twisting off plastic bottle caps is a ritual of daily life, 24/7.

In China, you brush your teeth with bottled water, you make your tea with it. If you're smart, you even wash your salad with it unless you want a very bad dose of Chairman Mao's revenge.

Even the rooms in the pampered five-star hotel that Premier Gordon Campbell and his delegation is staying in while in Beijing during a trade mission puts a warning by the faucets that guests should heed if they hope to make their meetings on time: "Tap water is NOT drinkable."

Since the 1990s, when China's water pollution became a byproduct of the country's rush toward becoming an economic superpower, bottled water has become big business. Companies have come up with all sorts of reassuring names for it, too: Pure Clear water, Green Garden water, Crystal Dragon, to name a few.

The premier, like all the other guests at his hotel in Beijing, were being offered something called Ice Dew, a Coca Cola product. Its label reassures that it has zero calories and carbs, although it doesn't list what you might really want to see, which is zero pollution.

If you don't have enough money for bottled water, which would put you in the same boat with hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, then you must carefully boil everything you drink in China. That takes care of the bacteria, most of the time, although you are out of luck if you are dealing with toxins.

Taking a shower in Beijing can be a disturbing experience, too. While the water may come out of the shower head clear most of the time, it can suddenly change to a dark red, probably from the rust of old pipes, or a musty-smelling yellow, a shift that I've never had fully explained.

Occasionally it might trickle to a stop, when the water system shuts down unannounced for repairs.

It could be worse. In Guangdong, the southern province Campbell will be visiting later this week, people suspect polluted water is responsible for "cancer cluster" villages. It has been shown that some of the water in the heavily industrialized zone is so polluted that water from the tap slowly corrodes metal teapots.

Just this month, the state news agency Xinhua put China's drinking water problem in stark relief. It announced that more than 300 million peasants in the countryside lack safe drinking water. It's estimated that about two out of every three wells in China don't meet sanitation standards and much of the water is laced with arsenic, high concentrations of salt and other pollutants.

Outside observers offer up even grimmer statistics. More than 700 million Chinese imbibe water that doesn't meet the World Health Organization's minimum safety threshold. It's also estimated that about 80 per cent of China's sewage isn't properly treated.

China's regime, to its credit, is starting to recognize it has a huge problem on its hands. A lack of potable water is seen as a possible destabilizing social factor as China's rulers strive for "social harmony" during their economic boom. In the face of increasing unruliness, and occasional riots, by the country's peasant class over the state of water, the government recently promised to make drinking water sanitary in hundreds of major water sources by about 2010.

Yet like everything in China, fixing the problem is on a scale that developed countries often find unimaginable. It was just a year ago there was an explosion at a plant in Jilin, a city in China's northeast, that forced evacuation of about 10,000 people.

After about two weeks, the government officially announced that 100 tons of the carcinogen benzene had spilled into the Songhua river, prompting the shutdown of the water to the 10 million residents of Harbin for five days, which necessitated bringing in millions of bottles of water.