BEIJING, Oct. 4 (Xinhuanet) -- Tongxiang is a county-level municipality in Zhejiang Province, east China. Local people have had a bitter-sweet taste of rapid economic development in the last two decades.

    Along with economic development, local people's incomes have increased dramatically. "But at one time water pollution was so serious that we almost didn't have potable water to drink," said Zheng Xiaoyan, an engineer with the local environmental protection bureau.

    The city began taking measures to improve its ecological environment in 1999. Tongxiang used to have 130 kilns making bricks and tiles. They burned huge amounts of coal and their chimneys belched out black smoke night and day. The kilns also consumed huge quantities of clay as raw material, destroying largetracts of farmland.

    Correctional action lasted four years, when 79 of the kilns were blown up. The remaining 51 kilns have continued to produce bricks and tiles but with clay as well as silt and slag. Thanks tothe use of slag as raw material, which contains residual coal, 111,600 tons of coal are saved annually. And the chimneys no longer belch out black smoke following the adoption of technical renovations.

    Tongxiang has made a plan to spend 621 million yuan building nine wastewater disposal plants, some of which have gone into operation and been able to dispose of a combined 110,000 tons of wastewater a day, 64.7 percent of the total planned capacity. As aresult, water pollution throughout Tongxiang has eased dramatically.

    Each year, about 800,000 tons of excreta from livestock, poultry and silkworms are collected for comprehensive utilization in the municipality, according to Zhen Xiaoyan.

    In 2002 the city spent 2.19 percent of its 14.727 billion yuan GDP on environmental protection and in 2003, when its GDP rose to 17.692 billion yuan, the rate was maintained at 1.73 percent.

    Last April, a group of experts headed by Pan Jiahua, 48, visited Tongxiang to assess the city's ecological construction program. Pan is a research fellow of the Research Center for Sustainable Development under China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and one of the experts the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has invited to contribute ideas to ecological construction. After over four months of investigations, the group of experts gave high marks for the municipality's ecological improvement efforts.

    The experts, in particular, are impressed by local efforts to protect Wuzhen, an ancient town with a population of 60,000. Divided into four parts by cross-shaped waterways, Wuzhen looks like a Chinese ink and wash painting on a misty day. Clean wood-brick houses flank flagstone-paved streets and lanes. Stone arch bridges span clean waterways.

    The town has spent 50 million yuan on the first-phase restoration of traditional architecture and the construction of basic infrastructure facilities. The water town has vigorously developed a tourist industry, with resounding success. In 2001 thetown received 1.85 million domestic tourists and over 50,000 foreign tourists. Revenues from tourism grew to 1.696 billion yuanin 2003 from 230 million yuan in 1999.

    They speak highly of the "Four Major Chains of Circulatory Economy" mentioned in Tongxiang's ecological construction program. According to Zheng Xiaoyan, the four major chains refer respectively to utilization of slag and silt; utilization of livestock excreta; utilization of garbage and crop stalks as well as protection-development-protection of cultural resources.

    "The circulatory economy is a big concept," Zheng stressed. "I believe the core of a circulatory economy is a maximum utilizationof resources and a minimum pollution to the environment."

    Efforts at improving the ecology in Tongxiang are part of the ecological construction initiated by the SEPA in 1995, which is designed to implement the state strategy of sustainable development in the wake of environmental deterioration and ecological destruction resulting from excessive exploitation of natural resources.

    The nationwide ecological construction has been carried out on two tracks. One track is regional ecological construction for rural areas designed to heal the wounds of ecological destruction.By the end of 2003 SEPA had approved of building 484 state-level ecological pilot regions throughout the country and 82 of these pilot regions have been checked as attaining the 22 items of SEPA-set targets in three categories: economic development, environmental protection and social progress recognized as the three mainstays of sustainable development.

    "Targets set for these state-level ecological pilot regions arefairly low," said Peng Jinxin, 58, Director-General of the Nature &Ecology Conservation Department of the SEPA. "They distinctively reflect conditions in the mid-1990s."

    On the other track, localities aim to achieve higher standards in terms of ecological construction both in urban and rural areas.In 1998 Hainan Province in the south took the lead in working out its own ecological construction program. The provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang quickly followed the suit next year.

    SEPA was delighted at this development. It quickly organized 150 specialists in formulating ecological construction targets forprovinces, municipalities and counties. The team of specialists set 22 targets for a province, 28 for a municipality and 36 for a county. The sets of targets were put into trial implementation last year.

    Up to now eight provinces, including Fujian, Zhejiang, Shandong,Jiangsu and Anhui, have applied and got SEPA approval to go on this track, striving to achieve their respective scheduled ecological construction targets. Municipalities and counties underthem will naturally go on the track, too. This signals that China's efforts at ecological construction are unfolding on a nationwidescale, with attention paid to both urban and rural areas.

    "We do not have a unified ecological construction plan for the whole country," Peng Jinxin said. "Provinces on the track have started their programs on a voluntary basis. We expect the first group of ecological provinces to appear in an embryonic form around 2020."

    The central government will help provinces achieve their ecological construction targets by financing, partly or wholly, big projects that aim to improve the ecology, Peng said.

    Help from the central government also comes in the form of expertise offered by SEPA. "We organize experts in working out ecological construction targets, help local governments work out programs and formulate favorable policies that help localities to achieve their targets," Peng said.

    Provinces carrying out ecological construction programs have been making fast progress. In 1999 when Hainan started its program,only 3 percent of its sewage was treated. Next year, however, the rate of sewage treatment there is expected to reach 50 percent. InBeijing, 48 percent of sewage is treated at present and the rate is expected to reach 90 percent by 2008.

    Despite great efforts and marked ecological improvements in a growing number of regions, environmental deterioration continues to be a serious problem for China as a whole. According to recent reports, factories along the upper reaches of the Huaihe River suddenly released huge amounts of long-held polluted water as heavy rainfall threatened to inundate everything, turning China's fourth biggest river into a giant sewer.

    Years ago, a central government-organized anti-pollution campaign was supposed to have cleaned up the area. China still hasa long way to go before being able to restore its ecology to an acceptable level and achieve sustainable development. Enditem