Word: yellowness
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...country changing as rapidly as China is, people often take comfort from things that remain the same. That may explain the alarm felt by residents of the western city of Lanzhou on Sunday afternoon, when they noticed that a stretch of the 3,400-mile Yellow River was not yellow - not even tan - but a color closer to magenta. By the next day China's official news agency, Xinhua, had published photographs of the Biblically hued slick and reported that an unknown substance spilling out of a local sewer had caused the river to "turn red and smelly...
...China has long referred to the Yellow River - which runs a silted (hence "yellow") course from the plains of Qinghai near Tibet to the Bohai Bay, opposite the Korean Peninsula - as "China's Sorrow." The name refers to the floods that have plagued people along its banks for millennia, but it has resonated painfully in recent years as the river has fallen victim to excessive damming, frequent pollution and misguided diversion schemes...
...first time in China's recorded history, the Yellow dried up in patches and failed to reach the sea. Since then it has run dry so long and so often that some scientists have suggested it ought to be a considered an inland body of water, or even a seasonal phenomenon...
...Yellow's sorrows reflect the situation of China's other waterways. Rivers in other parts of the country have run black and occasionally turned other unnatural colors from an overloading with effluents from paper mills and dye factories. According to recent government figures some 320 million Chinese still lack access to clean drinking water. Lead and arsenic have been among the contaminants reported in recent pollution scandals...
...Though China's central government has prioritized cleaning up its polluted rivers and has pledged vast sums for the purpose - one plan is to flush the Yellow with water diverted from the cleaner Yangtze - enforcement of environmental laws at the local level remains spotty at best. Local government officials often have a stake in the very factories responsible for the pollution. Typically, officials from Beijing announce a plan to visit, and their local counterparts scramble like frat boys preparing for a parental visit after a keg party. The mess is temporarily tidied and offending factories closed for a few days...