Residents living along the Zaojiang River in Changzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, were found to be indifferent to worsening pollution in the already filthy river last week. Zaojiang flows into the Yangtze River.

Apparently disappointed at the failure of the authorities to improve the situation for at least four years, people did not even bother to complain, a Xinhua report said.

Such an attitude is more worrying than the pollution itself, given the fact that pollution is getting worse in China. It seems that more and more people are trying to learn to live with an increasingly unhealthy environment rather than complain about it.

It is not difficult to know why a scandal does not hold people's attention for long, though, as there seem to be too many to take notice of.

Also last week, a sewage disposal facility worth US$8 million was found lying idle, letting toxic water flow by to harm people downstream in Tongchuan, a city in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province. This aroused concern about public money being spent on the environment.

In spite of worsening pollution there, the facility has never operated since being built about two years ago, allegedly because of a lack of cash, China Central Television reported last week.

The scandals are just two of many such cases. Some are much bigger in nature and relate to bad planning, inefficiency, the misuse of public funds or even corruption.

In 2003 alone, 426,000 complaints about the contamination of waterways, air and land were acknowledged by the environment authorities.

Reports say that due to bureaucracy, many complaints have been shelved for years. In 2003 alone, unsolved problems led to 60,000 disputes or incidents, posing a threat to social stability, the China Environment Daily said.

The statistics make people wonder whether these pollution problems reported so far are just the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to media reports, people judge the situation by what they see everyday as they go about their business at home or while traveling to other parts of China.

They are right to question a situation that concerns their health and the spending of State revenue that they contribute to by paying taxes.

One can easily see while traveling about that more rivers and lakes are dark and smelly due to contamination, with increasing industrial emissions and everyday toxic wastes flowing into them.

You might recall the notorious Huaihe River scandal, when 60 billion yuan (US$7.26 billion) of public funds was allegedly used to treat contaminated water in the river in Anhui Province, with little result.

In China nationwide, 700 billion yuan (US$84.6 billion) was apparently spent on improving the environment between 2000 and this year, more than 14 times the amount spent between 1986 and 1990. A big portion came from State revenue.

Chen Bin, deputy director of the financing department of the State Environmental Protection Administration, has estimated that for the next five years, 1,300 billion yuan (US$157.2 billion) will be needed to clean China up, half of which will come from the State, xinhuanet.com reports.

By looking a bit closer at the pollution problem, one can see worsening pollution in districts and villages where low-income, underprivileged residents and poor farmers live.

Profit-maximizing enterprises, facing a trade-off between conscience and efficiency, tend to spend as little as possible on treating waste even though toxic emissions can harm many people downstream or downwind.

If firms cannot avoid residential areas, they choose areas where residents are mostly poor and have relatively little say in policymaking.

In the name of appealing to investors, local authorities tend to spend public cash in key city areas, in image-building districts and streets.

Affluent people can buy relatively clean water and air, or at least keep a distance from contaminated water and air, by choosing to live in locations that coincide with a city's image-building areas.

Environment watchdogs, also facing a trade-off between revenue and justice, usually pay less attention to poor areas and accept with little protest emissions from polluting plants, which are a source of government revenue.

The environmental landscape in China increasingly displays this feature - pollution occurs more often than not in poor districts and villages. Environmental problems are closely associated with other problems, such as injustice and inefficiency. This all adds an extra dimension to the widening gap between rich and poor.

Poor urban residents and farmers are entitled to enjoy clean water and air; they too contribute to State coffers, which grew by 26 per cent to 2.57 trillion yuan (US$310 billion) last year.

Market failures and the inefficiency of government intervention can both be blamed for worsening pollution. And corruption is probably the biggest root cause.

To curb worsening pollution, the people-first principle should help policymakers listen to problems in poor districts and villages, where environment problems, the inefficiency of the use of public funds, social injustice, bureaucracy and corruption all converge.

An initiative for a new tax - an environmental protection tax - has received little response. It is meaningless to have a new tax while existing State revenue resources are not used efficiently or are even misused.

The Beijing-based China Business newspaper has reported that the initiative is being studied by central government departments.

Pan Yue, deputy-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, warned in May at the Fortune Global Forum in Beijing that an environment crisis is not looming, but is already a reality in China.

Pan urged the government to treat the problem as a political one, as an issue of justice and democracy. Let's hope his words are heeded.

(China Daily June 23, 2005)