China's Water Wars More Reality than Cli-Fi
Oct 19, 2014
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Sydney Morning Herald
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Living in Beijing, I often felt bad about taking a shower. It was guilt because, in our house, you had to run a good five minutes of water down the drain before it turned hot. Such a waste in a city in chronic drought.
China is the perfect setting for a cli-fi movie, not that it would ever be allowed to screen there. As Patricia Adams of Probe International recently outlined, 90 per cent of the country's groundwater is polluted and at least 74 cities exceed the World Health Organisation's air pollution standards. These days, even the government acknowledges the existence of "450 cancer villages" where death rates are abnormally high because their air and water have been poisoned by power plants and industrial facilities.