According to foreign media reports, more than 40 percent of China’s industrial, agricultural and domestic wastewater flows into the Yangtze River, but 80 percent of it is not treated, and the slowdown in flow caused by the Three Gorges Buster will push the Yangtze to the limit of its capacity and prevent it from purifying itself. Environmental experts warn that if urgent measures are not taken to deal with the pollution problem, the Yangtze River, the third largest river in the world, will become stagnant within five years. The picture shows various cargo ships and tugboats sailing along the Yangtze River towards the mouth of the sea.
Another environmental volunteer has recently been involved in an accident on the mainland. For years, the Chinese Communist Party has been “encouraging” environmental protection in public, while secretly arresting environmental volunteers on various “charges”. Analysis suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is only superficially engaged in environmental protection, and will suppress volunteers if their monitoring involves the interests of the powerful.
On April 2, a number of volunteers in Hebei and Tianjin sent word that Mr. Zhou, an environmental volunteer from Laokokou, Xiangyang, Hubei, had disappeared on April 1.
Before his disappearance, Mr. Zhou posted a video on March 17 exposing a chemical plant in Laohekou that illegally discharged water into the Han River, resulting in a large number of dead fish. This was the last video Mr. Zhou sent before he was lost.
In the afternoon of the same day, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Hubei Laokhekou City government website released a message saying, “On March 31, Laokhekou City police cracked a case suspected of committing extortion and blackmail crimes, and the suspects Zhou Moujun and Xiao Moujun were criminally detained according to the law.”
The arrested persons are Zhou Jianjun and Xiao Jianjun, who are both environmental protection volunteers, and Zhou Jianjun is the director of the “China Green Development Council (China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation) Protected Area Migratory Bird Reserve – Han River”.
The government and police in Laohekou did not mention the loss of Mr. Zhou, and the April 8 report on Mr. Zhou’s disappearance was not mentioned in the Punch News, which did not mention whether Mr. Zhou was Zhou Jianjun.
But the surging news quoted Dr. Zhou Jinfeng, vice chairman and secretary-general of the Green Council, as saying, “(in response to Mr. Zhou’s disappearance) volunteers engaged in conservation work, we are firmly supportive, volunteers because engaged in conservation work, offended the interests of some people, by some people ‘clean up’ including ‘design’, ‘clean up’ them these things, we have also experienced, seen and corrected. This has happened to volunteers before in Guangdong, Fujian and other places, and volunteers have been dealt with constantly. All of these things have received widespread attention and repercussions from the community, and our attitude is to respect the facts.”
According to a member of the Green Development Council via Land Media, the missing Mr. Zhou, a native of Laohekou City in Hubei, has been driving a motorized boat on the Han River since 2018, working with other local volunteers to monitor local incidents of illegal fishing, poisoning of wild migratory birds, electrofishing, the random dumping of tens of thousands of tons of construction waste into the Han River, and the massive use of the chemical shrimp holding spirit to pollute the river.
In July 2020, Mr. Zhou commissioned environmental volunteers in Tianjin to send a thick packet of materials and a flash drive to members of the China Green Development Council because Mr. Zhou felt he was facing unknowable insecurity.
The materials and flash drive contained information related to Mr. Zhou’s reports of illegal electrofishing, illegal fishing, and poisoning of migratory birds in the Han River in recent years.
Analysis of frequent arrests of environmental volunteers on the mainland: caused by the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party
Li Genshan, who was appointed as the director of the China Green Development Council’s “Chinese Yellow Sheep Reserve – Zhongwei” in 2018, was arrested in September 2020, along with 14 other volunteers, for “allegedly provoking trouble, extortion and robbery.
Before he was arrested, Li Genshan and other volunteers reported that the local forest police were suspected of harboring poachers. He was also involved in reporting the former Murray paper industry in the Tengri Desert sewage, as well as armed poaching, tanker truck dumping waste water and other events.
This (Li Genshan’s arrest) is another in a long line of incidents in China in which he has been detained and even sentenced for his concern for environmental protection, suggesting that environmental volunteers have become an intolerable presence under totalitarian rule, according to an analysis cited by the website Minsheng Watch in October 2020.
The analysis shows that the totalitarian ruling group of the Chinese Communist Party is essentially designed to enslave and scavenge its people, and never takes environmental pollution, wildlife protection, and other issues seriously, but only superficially shows concern for the environment due to pressure from the world and the public, and once environmental protection affects the interests of powerful interests, those who are concerned and protest environmental pollution become the target of removal by the powerful.
Previously, in March 2018, environmental volunteer Lei Ping was arrested for “spreading rumors and disturbing public order” and detained for 10 days. Two months before her arrest, Lei Ping exposed the pollution of a quarry in Xinyi, and the police had asked her to delete the post, but Lei refused.
In 2007, a large number of people in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, suddenly had an unpleasant odor from their tap water that made it undrinkable, and the city’s water source, Taihu Lake, turned green overnight.
A journalist in Beijing who was concerned about environmental affairs at the time said that the deterioration of the water in Taihu Lake was related to industrial effluent discharge, and that an environmental volunteer had been reporting such enterprises and had therefore been beaten numerous times and shut down dozens of times.
She lamented, “Now I’ve been asked to write this piece, but I really can’t do it. I don’t know what the future holds for those of us with a conscience.”
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