How children saved the river: as the rest of China 'develops at all costs', rivers and people take priority in Chengdu's urban plan. Ma Guihua finds out how - Get it Right!

New Internationalist, Dec, 2002 by Ma Guihua

'It never occurred to me that the river could become so beautiful. I'm so happy and proud,' says Po. Bo, one of the pupils who wrote the letter to the mayor in 1985.

Having come this far, the city government now nurtures more ambitions. Work on the upper and lower reaches of Funan River has begun. To save precious water resources a large water-treatment project of 200 million yuan ($24 million) has just been inaugurated which will channel the water upstream for reuse.

Longjianglu Primary School has since launched its environment education programme and encouraged students to participate regularly in activities to monitor the pollution of the river and campaign for keeping it clean. 'From the very beginning the Funan River Revitalization Project has been an education campaign on environment,' notes Ai Nanshan, professor with the Architecture and Environment Academy of Sichuan University. 'Marginal groups living in shanties are attended to and public green fields are provided for all to care. This kind of human touch is something far more significant than the project itself.'

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IN a country where economic growth is being pursued at a rapacious rate, Chengdu is not the only city in China that has recognized that economic development does not necessarily deliver human development. Guangzhou (formerly Canton)--a sprawling city of 3,700 square kilometres with 7 million people in China's prosperous Guangdong province--has experienced double-digit economic growth since the mid-1980s. But by the mid-1990s its living environment was plagued by traffic congestion, air pollution and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. Citizens, visitors and businesses complained loud and long. So in 1997 the municipality put in train a five-year-action plan. To help control car emissions they built an 18-kilometre subway and improved traffic flow by building a ring-road and bridges. As with Chengdu's river clean-up a massive relocation process needed to be undertaken to implement Guangzhou's new transport system: 14,000 households, businesses and institutions were moved, mainly to bigger and better-servi ced living spaces. The city reduced industrial pollutants, started to convert to diesel, emphasized the treatment of domestic sewage, cleaned up streets and toughened pollution laws.

In its submission to the UN HABITAT 'best practice' awards for improving the living environment, the municipality explains its new approach: 'Our previous policy of seeking rapid economic growth at the expense of the environment was short-sighted. Guangzhou's Action Plan replaced the past practice of "treatment after pollution" with "pollution prevention" and the principle of "economy first" with "ecology first".' Planners from 30 Chinese cities have come to Guangzhou to study the programme and it's now being applied in Hangzhou, Nanjing, Jinan, Xiamen and Changsha.

In Chengdu's experience, as the environment started to work for the people the people started to work for the environment. They volunteered to help construct new river banks and get the silt out of the river. Concern about protecting the river is now shared across the community. Older citizens act as defacto inspectors reporting on those who still dump garbage into the river. Local media run regular reports on the rivers progress. Even now, suggestions about how the river could be improved are gathered once a week and passed on to decision-makers.