工业排污屡禁不止 太湖水难清

ZHOUTIE, China — By autumn, the stench of Lake Tai and the freakish green glow of its waters usually fade with the ebbing of the summer heat, but this year is different. Standing on a concrete embankment overlooking a fetid, floating array of plastic bottles, foam takeout containers, flip-flops and the occasional dead fish, Wu Lihong, the lake’s unofficial guardian, shook his head in disgust.

中国周铁——到了秋季，太湖散发的恶臭，以及湖面怪异的绿光，通常会随着夏天的热浪一起褪去，但今年的情况有所不同。一处水泥堤坝正对着的湖面上，漂浮着一片恶臭的杂物，有各种塑料瓶、泡沫饭盒、人字拖鞋，以及少量死鱼。太湖的非官方守护者吴立红摇着头，脸上露出厌恶的表情。

“If you jumped into this water, you’d shed a layer of skin,” he said one recent afternoon. “The government claims they are cleaning up the lake, but as you can see, it’s just not true.”

“要是掉下去，你会脱掉一层皮，”他在最近一天的下午说。“他们说他们在清理了，不过你自己看吧，不是这样的。”

Seven years after a toxic algae bloom forced millions of people who depended on the lake to find alternative sources of drinking water, Lake Tai, which straddles two provinces in the Yangtze River delta, remains a pungent symbol of China’s inability to tackle some of its most serious environmental problems.

太湖横跨长江三角洲的两个省，是中国的第三大淡水湖。七年前，有毒的蓝藻污染危机爆发，数百万饮用太湖水的居民不得不寻找别的饮用水源。如今，刺鼻的太湖仍然是一个重要的象征，显示出中国无法解决某些极为严重的环境问题。

Since the 2007 crisis, which drew widespread domestic news media coverage and prompted a special meeting of the cabinet, the government has spent billions of dollars cleaning up the lake, the country’s third-largest freshwater body. But environmentalists say it has little to show for the money. Hundreds of chemical plants, textile mills and ceramics workshops continue to dump their noxious effluent into the waterways that feed into Lake Tai.

中国新闻媒体广泛报道了2007年那次危机，国务院也为此召开了特别会议，自那时以来，政府已经花费了上百亿美元来治理太湖污染。但环保人士说，这些钱几乎看不到效果。数百家化工厂、纺织厂和陶瓷作坊仍然在将有毒污水排入河道，并最终流入太湖。

“Some progress has been made, but we haven’t yet reached a turning point,” said Ma Jun, one of the country’s leading environmentalists. “For many factories, the cost of violating the rules is lower than the cost of compliance.”

“治理工作取得了一些进展，但是还没有达到拐点，”中国知名环保人士马军说。“对于很多工厂而言，违规成本低于守法成本。”

Also unchanged is the persecution of Mr. Wu, 46, a scrappy, self-taught environmentalist who spent three years in jail on what he said were trumped-up fraud charges — punishment, he said, for his dogged campaign against the factory owners and their local government allies, whom he blames for despoiling the lake.

吴立红遭受迫害的境遇也没有改变。吴立红现年46岁，是自学成才的环保人士，行动果断的他曾经坐过三年牢。他说当局为了惩罚他而编造了欺诈罪名，原因是他顽强地与工厂老板及其在当地政府的保护伞做斗争。吴立红说，太湖就是被他们毁掉的。

Since emerging from prison in 2010, Mr. Wu has continued his advocacy work, prompting a predictable response from the authorities. He is subjected to periods of confinement at his home in Zhoutie, a village on Lake Tai. His cellphone is monitored by the police and he is barred from traveling beyond Yixing, the township in eastern Jiangsu Province that includes Zhoutie.

2010年出狱之后，吴立红继续投身环保倡导活动。结果不出所料，他时常被软禁在周铁镇的家中，手机遭到警方监听，除了宜兴之外哪里也不能去。周铁是太湖边上的一座小镇，属于江苏省东部的宜兴市。

Plainclothes police officers often accompany him on shopping excursions, and surveillance cameras line the narrow road to his home. Vengeful officials, he said, have even stymied his efforts to find a job by warning away would-be employers. “If it wasn’t for the garden in front of my house, I’d probably starve,” said Mr. Wu, a short, pudgy-faced man who often sounds like he is shouting, even when indoors.

他出门购物时，经常有便衣警察跟踪。在通往他家的狭窄道路上，安装着一排监控摄像头。他说，官员们怀恨在心，甚至警告有意向的雇主不要聘用他，让他找不到工作。“我家前面的菜园里种了点儿菜，要不我就饿死了，”吴立红说。他个子不高，脸部圆胖，即使在室内讲话，也会声音洪亮，仿佛是在喊叫。

Reached by phone, an employee of the Zhoutie public security bureau denied that it curtailed Mr. Wu’s freedom.

在接到采访电话时，周铁镇的一名公安人员否认限制了吴立红的自由。

The experiences of both Lake Tai and Mr. Wu speak volumes about the Chinese government’s often contradictory approach to environmental protection. Confronted by public anger over contaminated air, water and soil, the ruling Communist Party has sought to shutter obsolete steel mills, restrict the number of license plates available to big-city drivers, and recalibrate the economic-growth-at-all-costs criteria used to evaluate local officials. This year, Prime Minister Li Keqiang “declared war” on pollution in a speech to the national legislature.

太湖和吴立红的经历，明显体现了中国政府对待环保时，常常自相矛盾的态度。由于公众对空气、水和土壤的污染表达了愤怒，执政的共产党寻求关闭落后的钢厂，在大城市对车辆按尾号限行，并调整了考察地方官员政绩时，不惜一切代价保障经济增长的标准。今年，李克强总理在全国人大开幕式上表示，要向污染“宣战”。

But some local officials oppose policies they fear could close factories and eliminate jobs. They also prefer to deal with environmental problems their own way, if at all, which is why Mr. Wu ran into trouble with officials in Jiangsu, a relatively wealthy slice of coastal China that has prospered from its fecund, well-watered landscape but even more from industrial development, which has fouled the region’s rivers and canals.

但是，一些地方官员反对某些环保政策，因为他们担心这些政策可能会导致工厂停工，就业岗位减少。而且即使真的想治理环境，他们也只愿意以自己的方式来处理问题，这也正是吴立红在江苏遇到麻烦的原因。江苏是个比较富裕的省份，它的繁荣不仅源自土地丰饶、水源充沛，更重要的是受到了工业发展的推动。但工业发展对这片区域的河流和运河也造成了污染。

Beginning in the mid-1990s, when he began noticing a sickly rainbow hue in the once-pristine creeks near his home, Mr. Wu began a campaign to name and shame polluting factories in Zhoutie. He collected water samples in plastic bottles, wrote letters to high-ranking environmental officials and invited television reporters to film how factories secretly discharged their wastewater at night.

90年代中期，吴立红开始注意到，他家附近一条曾经清澈的小溪，呈现出了彩虹一般的怪异色彩。于是他发起了一项活动，曝光周铁那些排放污染的工厂。他用塑料瓶收集水样，写信给高级环保官员，并邀请电视台记者拍摄这些工厂在夜间偷偷排放废水的情景。

In 2001, after local officials drained and dredged a canal that had been polluted by a dye plant in advance of an inspection tour from Beijing, Mr. Wu exposed their ruse — which included dumping carp into the canal and dispatching villagers with fishing rods to complete the Potemkin image of ecological recovery. In the years that followed, he became something of a media celebrity; in 2005, the National People’s Congress named him an “Environmental Warrior.”

2001年，北京派人来视察时，当地官员提前准备，对一条被染料厂污染的运河进行了排水和清淤处理。为了制造生态已经恢复的假象，他们还把鲤鱼倾倒进这条运河，安排村民拿上鱼竿，而吴立红揭露了他们的伪装。在随后的几年里，他成为了媒体名人，2005年，全国人大授予了他“十大环保人物”称号。

Back in Yixing, which earns 80 percent of its tax revenue from local industry, officials were furious. In 2007, as he was preparing a lawsuit against the environmental bureau, Mr. Wu was arrested and charged with trying to blackmail a company in exchange for withholding accusations of wrongdoing. During his interrogation, Mr. Wu said, he was whipped with willow branches, burned with cigarettes and kept in solitary confinement with little to eat. “The abuse was more than I could take, so of course I signed the confession they had drawn up,” he later said.

但是宜兴的官员们怒不可遏。当地80%的财政收入来自工业税收。2007年，正准备状告环保局的吴立红遭到了逮捕，检察部门指控他企图把一家公司的不当行为当作把柄，向其勒索钱财。吴立红说，审讯时有人用柳条抽打他，还用点燃的烟头烫他，他被单独关押，几乎没有东西吃。“打得我受不了，那他们叫我签什么我就签什么嘛，”他后来说。

Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future,” said environmental activists in China must walk a fine line, knowing when it is safe to push and when it is best to keep quiet. “Wu is a maverick, prone to say exactly what he thinks without considering the political consequences,” she said. “That is not the type of political participation that Beijing desires, even if he is right.”

易明(Elizabeth Economy)是对外关系委员会(Council on Foreign Relations)的高级研究员，著有《一江黑水：中国未来的环境挑战》(The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future)。她说，中国的环保人士必须有所折衷，知道什么时候施压比较安全，什么时候又最好保持缄默。“吴立红是个特立独行的人，心里怎么想嘴里就怎么说，完全不考虑政治后果，”她说。“即使他占理，这种人也不是北京喜欢的那类政治参与者。”

That summer, shortly before he was put on trial, the industrial effluent flowing into Lake Tai from the 2,000 factories in the region reached a tipping point, prompting the algae bloom that forced officials in the nearby city of Wuxi to cut off water to two million residents.

那年夏天，就在他的案子审理之前不久，该地区2000家工厂排入太湖的工业废水量达到了临界点，导致蓝藻危机爆发，附近的无锡市的官员不得不切断了200万居民的供水。

Under the glare of a national spotlight, Jiangsu officials said they would spend more than $14 billion to clean up the lake and vowed to address the problem of toxic algae blooms within five years.

此事引起了举国关注，江苏省的官员在压力下表态，他们将投入1000亿元资金治理太湖，并发誓在五年内解决有毒藻类泛滥的问题。

But the money, government researchers acknowledge, has had a negligible impact. According to the Lake Tai Basin Authority, 90 percent of water samples taken from the lake this summer were considered so toxic that contact with human skin was ill-advised. Wuxi, in the meantime, has found an alternative source for its drinking water.

不过，政府研究人员承认，这些资金投入收效甚微。太湖流域管理局的资料显示，今年夏天取自太湖的水样中，90%存在严重毒性，不宜接触人类皮肤。同时，无锡也找到了饮用水的替代来源。

In a recent interview with Xinhua Daily, Zhang Limin, deputy director of the Lake Tai Water Pollution Prevention Office, said the flood of contaminants had begun to level off, although it is still more than three times as much as the lake can absorb without killing most aquatic life.

张利民是太湖水污染防治办公室的副主任。近期在接受《新华日报》采访时，他表示，太湖水质呈现稳中向好态势，但污染物排放总量仍然超过环境容量，为不会造成大多数水生物死亡的水平的三倍多。

Flushing the lake with water from the Yangtze River has improved water quality somewhat, though critics say it simply pushes pollution further downstream. These days, many polluters have built pipelines to centralized waste-treatment plants that are incapable of handling the flow. Others simply pipe waste directly into waterways through underground conduits that allow them to avoid detection.

引长江水入太湖的工程令水质有所改善，但批评者表示，这只会把污染冲到下游。如今有很多排污单位修建了管道，把污水输送到集中处理的工厂，可是这些地方并不具备相应的处理规模。另有一些排污单位则通过隐蔽的地下管道，直接把废水偷偷排入水道。

But environmentalists say there is reason for hope. In April, the central government revised the nation’s environmental law for the first time since 1989, imposing steep fines on polluters and requiring companies to disclose pollution data. The regulations, which take effect in January, will also allow environmental groups to file public interest lawsuits against factories that break the law.

一些环保人士觉得还有希望。今年4月，中央政府自1989年以来首次修订了《环境保护法》，大幅提高了对排污单位的罚款标准，并要求企业披露污染数据。这些监管规定将于明年1月份生效，届时环保团体也可以对违规工厂提起公益诉讼。

Mr. Ma, the environmentalist, said the new measures include important tools for cleaning up Lake Tai and other ailing bodies of water, but the key would be enforcement. “All it takes is the mayor or the head of a county saying, ‘You can’t touch this factory. It’s too important to the local economy,’ ” he said.

环保人士马军表示，《环境保护法》的新增内容为太湖等受污染水体的治理提供了重要工具，但关键在于执行。“只要市长或县长说一句，‘不能动这个厂，它对地方经济太重要了，’就会执行不下去，”他说。

Mr. Wu said he was less hopeful, noting how little has changed in recent years despite intense pressure from Beijing and the billions of dollars spent. “A lot of that money ends up lining the pockets of local officials,” he said.

吴立红说自己抱的希望不大，他指出，最近几年，尽管有来自北京的重压，还花费了上千亿，但并没有什么成效。“好多钱都被当官的给贪了，”他说。

His outspokenness has taken a toll on his family, who have also been subjected to frequent harassment. Last year his daughter, Wu Yunlei, went to the United States on a tourist visa and promptly requested political asylum. “When I was younger, I didn’t understand what my father was doing and I was often angry about the trouble it caused us, but now I’ve come to appreciate it,” she said in an email.

他的刚直已经给家人惹来了麻烦，令他们也经常遭到骚扰。去年，他的女儿吴韵蕾持旅游签证抵达美国后，马上申请了政治庇护。“小时候，我不理解父亲的做法，经常生他的气，因为那给我们带来了麻烦，但现在我认同了，”她通过电子邮件接受采访时写道。

Once content to focus on the environment, Mr. Wu now believes that healing his beloved lake requires more sweeping change. “If with all their wealth, the Communist Party can’t clean up this lake, it tells you the problem is much bigger,” he said. “I’ve come to realize the root of the problem is the system itself.”

吴立红原先只关注环境问题，但现在，他认为，要让心爱的太湖恢复原貌，就需要进行更加彻底的改变。“如果说花了那么多钱，共产党还是治理不了太湖的话，那就有更大的问题了，”他说。“后来我就意识到，这是体制的问题。”