Chap 7 The Coming China Wars Serialization

The Damnable Dam and Water Wars—Nary a (Clean) Drop to Drink

Team,

This one is freaky. It describes the beyond massive dams China is building across Asia with disastrous results.

I’ve seen some of this stuff firsthand and it isn’t pretty.

This is the fateful chapter where I predict China will cause a global pandemic. See if you find the passage!

Let me know what you think.

Peter

7. The Damnable Dam and Water Wars—Nary a (Clean) Drop to Drink

Zhang Lishan stands on a ridge of dirt tending a small vegetable garden surrounded by pools of stagnant, stinking water. His plot near the banks of the Yangtze River in China's eastern Anhui province is irrigated by the runoff from a large paper mill. "I can hardly grow anything because this water is poisoned," he says. "It kills all the fish and many of my neighbors have been made sick." At the point where the runoff meets the river, a dead pig bobs on the wake of a cargo ship steaming past. Mr. Zhang is far from alone in his distress. Across large swaths of China's rapidly industrializing countryside, polluted water is killing tens of thousands of people every year, threatening the health of millions more, and cutting the crop yields of farmers who have few other economic resources to fall back on.
—Financial Times

Of the 2000-plus villagers in Huang Meng Ying, nine are deaf, 14 mentally disabled, three blind, and nine physically handicapped. The villagers also point to the surge in birth defects, lesions, and gall bladder infections in recent years—a sure indication, they feel, that the water is contaminated. ... A glimpse of the river, which once irrigated what was one of the most fertile regions of the country, reveals why the villagers have arrived at this conclusion. The once-clear waters are today a floating mass of garbage and chemical effluents, unfit for irrigation, let alone drinking.
—Asian Chemical News

China is not just the world's "factory floor." It is now also the world's leading "cancer factory" and disease incubator. One major reason is a hellish level of water pollution almost beyond imagination.

Chinese water pollution is so severe that it has reduced many of China's lakes and many segments of its rivers to nothing more than turbid garbage bins and stinking, flourescent green dead zones literally toxic to the touch. As a result, over half of the population—some 700 million Chinese—now drink water well below World Health Organization standards while stomach, liver, and intestinal cancers have become one of the biggest "peasant killers" in the countryside.

China's River Styx brand of water pollution is caused not just by the massive dumping and indiscriminate burning of toxic wastes by heavy industry. An avalanche of excess fertilizer and pesticide runoff and a mountain of animal and human waste stand equally tall as culprits.