The environmental calamity in northeast China

is being followed with some interest in the Derb household. Not only

is this Mrs. Derb’s home district, but the company responsible for the

spillage is her old employer, Jilin Chemical (now Jilin

Petrochemical), one of the lumbering state-owned enterprises the

ChiComs have not yet figured out how to privatize. An explosion at

the plant twelve days ago killed several people and sent a huge slick

of chemicals (benzene, nitrobenzene, and aniline) into the Songhua River.

That slick has been proceeding downstream, which is to say northwards,

to the city of Harbin, whose water supply depends on it. There has

been a mass flight of people from Harbin — it’s no fun living in a

large city with no water supply. There was the usual failure of the

authorities to admit anything was wrong until they were forced to. An

international incident looms as this huge poisonous slick heads for

the Amur, and the Russian city of Khabarovsk… though so far the

Russians, who feel themselves weak in their Far East, are playing

nice.

Not the least aspect of this tragedy is that the Songhua, aside from

an occasional tendency to generate floods, is a beautiful river

flowing through what should be beautiful country. Its ultimate source

is the Heaven Pool I visited here.

I don’t suppose rapid industrialization can be beautiful — it wasn’t

in Europe or America — but it seems particularly sad that such

environmental horrors should be afflicting China, a nation whose art

and poetry have for millennia been centered on the beauties of the

natural world.

It only adds to the insult that China is at present cursed with a

brutish government of unelected technocratic apparatchiks, whose first

instinct in a case like this is to lie through their teeth, and whose

second is to shield the well-connected guilty while scapegoating the

innocent.