River of Tears
Inspired by Erin Brockovich

XIPING, China -- For the past five years, village doctor Zhang Changjian has rallied farmers here against a chemical factory dumping pollutants into a river.

This spring, they won a rare victory. A court found the pollution exceeded acceptable levels and ordered the Rongping Joint Chemical Plant to pay damages of about $85,000. But the farmers have yet to see any of the settlement. Mr. Zhang has been the target of police harassment, and the county government has closed down his clinic.

Zhang Changjian

When a chemical factory in rural China started dumping pollutants into a nearby river and cancer rates soared, village doctor Zhang Changjian, above, organized a campaign that called national attention to local farmers' plight. He drew inspiration from the movie "Erin Brockovich," starring Julia Roberts, based on a true story of a woman's crusade for justice after similar pollution in California.

A quiet man with a crop of stubby, graying hair, Mr. Zhang, 46 years old, refuses to be cowed. He continues to dispense medicine and monitor Rongping, often circling the factory in plastic slippers, a camera clamped to his belt. "Our food is still poisoned," says Mr. Zhang, pointing out the factory's wastewater spilling into the foul-smelling river that eventually flows into the East China Sea. "The farmers can't sell their crops and they're too poor to move."

Water pollution is among the most worrisome byproducts of China's rapid economic growth. Factories and cities dump some 40 to 60 billion tons of wastewater and sewage into lakes and rivers each year, according to Chinese government estimates. About 30% of China's rivers are so dirty they aren't fit for industrial or agricultural use, according to official statistics. Some 300 million Chinese -- roughly the size of the entire U.S. population -- don't have access to clean drinking water. The polluted water is becoming an international issue as it flows into Russia and other parts of Asia.

The government has sent mixed signals about how it intends to tackle the problem. Governmental bodies have given awards to environmental activists, published data stressing the magnitude of the pollution and relaxed controls on antipollution groups. That has allowed activists to form links and share notes, often via the Internet. "We all know each other," says Wu Lihong, who has been fighting river pollution in his hometown near Shanghai.

But especially at the local level, many officials are loath to let activists influence how factories are run. Provincial, county and village officials depend on industry to advance economic growth and their own careers. By one government estimate, a total of $125 billion has been invested in China's chemical and petrochemical plants -- suggesting the size of the stakes. Even when a factory is shut down, it often reopens. The central government has capped the fines for environment violations at about $120,000, and provincial authorities often set even lower caps.

Anger over the lack of clean water and air is rising. According to Pan Yue, vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration, about 50,000 protests last year were due to pollution.

Authorities in Pingnan County, which includes Xiping, acknowledged in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that the Rongping plant was responsible for excessive pollution in its early years. They said Rongping has taken steps to rectify the problem since 2001 and discharge levels are now within government standards. Mr. Zhang agrees the situation has improved but says pollution is still excessive.

The plant pays a third of the county's tax and other revenues and has provided well-paying jobs for peasants in this mountainous part of Fujian Province. Officials cite the economic benefits in opposing the plant's closing.

The Rongping plant opened here in 1994. It had previously been in Fujian's capital, Fuzhou. Officials relocated it to take advantage of cheap hydroelectric power from Xiping's mountain streams and promote rural economic development. A state-owned chemicals company based in Fuzhou is the plant's majority owner, although the Pingnan County government held a 30% stake until 2004.

With the factory's arrival, Xiping's population quickly doubled to 2,000 people. The plant became Asia's largest producer of potassium chlorate, a chemical widely used in bleach, fireworks and other goods. But it was also spewing chromium-6 into the river and belching chlorine from its smokestacks, according to a later provincial court verdict and the Fujian Province Environmental Supervision Center. The center said a sewage sample contained more than 20 times the amount of chromium-6 allowed by national standards. The statement by Pingnan County authorities confirms that chromium and chlorine were discharged but doesn't specify the amount or the type of chromium.

Chromium-6 plays a starring role in the movie "Erin Brockovich." It's based on a true story in which a paralegal (portrayed on screen by Julia Roberts) helped a California town's residents win $333 million from a utility that had leaked chromium into their water. Breathing chromium-6 has long been linked with lung cancer. According to U.S. authorities, ingesting the substance can damage the stomach, kidneys and liver.

Shortly after the Rongping factory opened, villagers started complaining that the emissions into the river were affecting their crops. Bamboo groves they harvested to sell to toy and chopstick makers shriveled and died. Downstream, in the nearby village of Houlong, Zheng Jiayao says he and his neighbors noticed fewer fish and shrimp and a strange smell coming from the green slime sometimes coating the water.

The factory offered to pay compensation to a handful of families whose plots abutted the factory gates. But it continued full operations.

Mr. Zhang is a "barefoot doctor," someone trained by the government to administer simple remedies and sent to remote areas that are too small to attract a doctor with a full medical degree. He arrived in Xiping in 1984. Over the years, the father of four built a comfortable practice.

In the late 1990s Mr. Zhang began noticing a spike in illnesses including stomach ailments, skin rashes and breathing problems. Combing through handwritten notes, he saw the change dated back to the factory's opening in 1994. More alarming was a rise in cancer cases. The disease accounted for just one of 13 deaths in the village between 1990 and 1994. Between 1999 and 2001, 17 of 24 deaths were cancer-related, Mr. Zhang found. Cancer victims included two 18-year-old girls and a 3-year-old boy.

In 1999, Mr. Zhang and a handful of other farmers started a letter-writing campaign. He says he drew inspiration from the Erin Brockovich movie, of which he has a copy at home. "I thought if the leaders only knew what was going on, they'd fix it," he said.

With each unanswered letter, he sent his complaints higher up the chain of command. Liu Xianbin, a former soldier with a gaunt frame who had developed cancer, enthusiastically joined in. Mr. Liu enlisted a friend to write a letter in English to former President Bill Clinton. He didn't get an answer, but he says he was questioned by local authorities about the letter and detained for a day.

In 2001, Mr. Zhang appealed to China's top environmental agency, and finally got an answer. He was told to organize a formal complaint. The doctor canvassed the villagers seeking signatures on a petition calling on the factory to stop polluting. He still has the original copy of the petition, on which farmers stamped a red thumbprint next to their signatures in the traditional Chinese manner. Mr. Zhang took soil and water samples and posted pictures of the dying bamboo groves on his Web site.

By the next year, the efforts started to bear fruit. The village head came out in support of Mr. Zhang. Villagers held a three-day leafleting campaign outside the county government offices, attracting attention from national newspapers and later a popular investigative segment on state-run national television. That summer, China's central government named Rongping one of the worst 55 polluters in China.

A rare victory: A provincial court awarded $85,000 in damages to villagers harmed by chemical pollution in Xiping's river, top. Executives at Rongping Joint Chemical Plant, bottom, say the company has now spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade its waste-water-treatment and chemical-storage facilities.

The publicity drew the attention of China's only pro-bono environmental law group. The Center for Legal Assistance for Pollution Victims in Beijing decided to help the villagers bring a lawsuit against the factory. Villagers chipped in to pay several thousand dollars for environmental tests. Whenever they spotted acrid liquid being dumped into the river, they scooped it up in empty plastic water bottles, villagers and lawyers say. Eventually 1,721 villagers joined the lawsuit, the most in an environmental case in Chinese history, lawyers say.

Even as national institutions aided Mr. Zhang's fight, he faced resistance and harassment at the local level. He says he was assaulted by a thug while collecting samples and his wife was punched and shoved to the ground by an assailant who visited their home. The county government shut down his clinic, on the ground floor of his house, saying he hadn't properly renewed his license. He denies that and still informally helps villagers who seek his medical help.

A county court initially ruled in favor of the farmers but awarded them minimal damages. Both sides appealed and a provincial court handed down its verdict this March. It raised the award to about $85,000, still far below the $1.7 million in damages and compensation the plaintiffs had sought. After years of litigation, the average farmer would get only about $50.

The factory has paid the damages to the county court, which says it will disperse the money when there's a system for determining who suffered how much damage.

The fight has left factory executives bitter. He Zhang, vice head of the plant, says the media misled the poorly educated villagers and failed to give Rongping credit for improving its environmental standards. "If you find any violations, please report them to us and we'll harshly punish those responsible," says Mr. He. "I myself am living in Pingnan County for more than 20 days a month. How could I sacrifice my health and move away from a big city just to make money?"

In their statement to the Journal, the Pingnan authorities said the excessive pollution levels in the first few years of the factory's operation were due to poor equipment, untrained workers and management failures. More recently, the plant has undergone 35 random tests under the supervision of the county environmental protection bureau and passed all of them, the statement said. Rongping officials say the plant has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade its wastewater-treatment and chemical-storage facilities.

Zhang Yangtong, who worked until recently in the packing room at Rongping, sees both sides of the debate. His job freed him from long days in the field and allowed his son to attend a better school. But he says he experienced headaches and other pain. He plans to move far away and return to farming.

The former worker says farmer neighbors sometimes accused him of siding with the entity that was poisoning them. His response: "It is the factory that is polluting, not us. We are just workers making a living here."

The court victory brought little consolation to Xu Shilian, one of the plaintiffs, who runs the village store. Ms. Xu has cancer, according to Mr. Zhang, but the village doctor and her relatives have kept the truth from her, fearing she would give up hope. "Even if we get the money it's too late. Not enough for treatment. Not enough to give me health," said Ms. Xu, 43, as she listlessly sold items that attest to Xiping's growing prosperity: packets of Pantene shampoo, phone cards and cola drinks.

Mr. Zhang acknowledges some improvements. Cancer rates have dropped off, and some brush has returned to once-barren hills. But replanted bamboo comes out scraggly. Villagers say there is no market for their mushroom, cabbage and other vegetables because people fear the produce is tainted.

Mr. Zhang says he is not going to give up his fight against the plant. "I'm a doctor. This is what I'm supposed to do."

--Cui Rong in Beijing contributed to this article.