In CHINA, Water You Wouldn’t Dare Swim In, Let Alone Drink

 Jin Zengmin was in a betting mood. Last month, the eyeglass entrepreneur from eastern China’s Zhejiang province announced that he would offer a $32,000 reward to the chief of the local environmental protection department if he dared to swim in a nearby river for a mere 20 minutes. Jin’s wager, which was announced on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social media service in China, turned viral on the Internet. The environmental cadre, unsurprisingly, declined to swim in the polluted water. After more than three decades of economic prosperity, China faces serious environmental challenges that are sure to be discussed during the National People’s Congress, the annual conclave currently underway in Beijing. Air pollution blankets hundreds of cities and the soil in vast parts of the country is contaminated. Thousands of rivers, too, have been ruined by China’s rapid urbanization and industrialization, such as the waterway in Jin’s hometown, Rui’an, a small city near Shanghai that is home to more than 100 shoe factories. “When I was a child, people swam or washed vegetables in the river,” Jin told TIME. “But those factories use chemical raw materials to make shoes and dump their industrial waste directly into the river.” (PHOTOS: Root of the Nation: Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River) In photographs posted by Jin on Sina Weibo, the river surface is covered by floating rubbish. What lies beneath could be even more dangerous. The smell, Jin alleges, is putrid. On Dec 8, Jin’s sister died of lung cancer at the age of 35. He blames water pollution for her death. “When my sister received medical treatment in big cancer hospitals in Shanghai,” Jin says, “we found that many patients there are from my hometown. They have various cancers, and what is astonishing is that most of the cancer patients are in their 30s to 50s. They are still young. I realized these cancers may have something to do with the water pollution in our hometown.” After Jin’s sister died, he called the local environmental protection department and asked them to check