Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

Green bloggers "China's Green Beat" explain in a new video the ecological challenges that populations are facing in the Nu River valley (Yunnan), as project for building huge dams are on their way. Interviews show local inhibitants trying to suggest some alternative solutions.

By Radio Free Asia
29 March 2007

Chinese authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are forcing tens of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs into producing almonds for the county government without pay, local residents and one official say.

The labor recruiting drive began in Yarkand county near Kashgar on March 6, and it requires every Uyghur household to send one person and a donkey cart to help in a massive expansion of the region’s traditional almond industry.

This article, via Mask of China, makes you think how far the river has come since Mao took his famous dips. Due to droughts (and a completely disregard for hard-hitting environmental policy), the Chang Jiang (??) or Yangtse River is packed with about 7 million cubic feet of garbage congesting at the controversial Three Gorges Dam.

China’s white river dolphin appears to now be extinct, according to a team of biologists that spent six weeks searching for it in its usual habitat of the Yangtze River. This makes it the first mammal globally to become extinct in the past 50 years, despite private attempts to preserve the animal. China’s rapid industrialization and pollution of the Yangtze River have largely been to blame, with no serious attempts by government to act to save the 25 million year old species.

MIANYANG, China - Chinese authorities prepared on Saturday to drain a swelling lake formed by a devastating earthquake, completing work on a drainage channel to divert water that threatens hundreds of thousands downstream.

Officials are expected to discharge flood water from the lake into the channel between Sunday and Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, quoting Yue Xi, deputy chief of the water and electricity section of the People's Armed Police.

In Chinese, there are several words meaning river, such as Jiang, He, Xi, Shui, Chuan. This one give you some idea of how to distinguish them.

Over one million people are facing water shortages because the Yangtze River is being ravaged by drought. But what effect will the ongoing drought have on the operation of the Three Gorges Dam? If the rain stays away, power generation targets must surely have to be amended.

Stranded ships, plagues of rats, pollution: Is China's mighty Yangtze river on the brink of environmental disaster ?

Toxic waste dumped into a river in northeastern China caused a bubbly red slick, prompting alarmed residents to buy bottled water and a complaint by Russia that Beijing was too slow in issuing a warning, news reports said Thursday.