Why Has Hejiachi, the Second-Largest Lake, Been Heading Toward Extinction Under "Protection"?
Hejiachi in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, has a history of over a thousand years. For it, twenty or thirty years is but a fleeting moment, yet in this "fleeting moment," its fate has taken a sharp turn: part of the lake surface has become land, and mud, slag and fields have "dismembered" it.
Hejiachi was once the second-largest lake in Shaoxing. In the "Code for Lake Names in China" issued by the Ministry of Water Resources in 1998, its area was 3750 mu, larger even than another famous lake in Zhejiang, Jianhu.
When the lake code was issued, villagers near Hejiachi had already been building dams on the lake surface for more than ten years. They pumped water and dug soil to make bricks, rapidly dividing the lake surface into several deep pits. By 2014, the total water surface area was less than 700 mu.
In the 2017 version of the comprehensive management plan for the Hejiachi water area, roads and farmland appeared in the locations of the original lake surface, drawing opposition from some nearby villagers.
The large pits became a "gold mine" for many people. They dumped mud here, filled in slag, built roads, and even planned to create 1000 mu of farmland in exchange for urban and rural construction land quotas - however, most of this land, exchanged for urban and rural construction land quotas and fiscal subsidies, has not yet been put to use; in the 40 mu where wheat was planted, the weeds are taller than the wheat.
In the view of the government officials interviewed, part of the land in Hejiachi is no longer water surface in nature. Precisely because the lake's "identity" is not entirely a lake, dumping mud, filling soil and creating farmland pose no problem. As for the road crossing the lake, it is even more greatly beneficial to local economic development: "The government has already attached great importance to the management plan for Hejiachi."
Deep Pits Carve Up the Lake Surface
Hejiachi is 15 kilometers east of Shaoxing's urban area. After the river water flows through this place, it heads north into the Qiantang River, then rushes on to Hangzhou Bay.
The introduction to Hejiachi on the Shaoxing municipal government website is not without pride. It is said that Hejiachi may be connected to the Tang dynasty poet He Zhizhang; the lake surface blends water and sky into one color; the west bank is Lu Xun's maternal grandmother's home; and the famous short story "Village Opera" took this as its background.
This lake, regarded as a calling card of Shaoxing, reached a turning point in its fate in 1985. Multiple nearby villagers told reporters that they built dams here at the time and created several intensive fish ponds. After that, the lake surface was no longer one continuous expanse, and the scene of boating and fishing was gone forever.
Over the following decade or more, most of the fish ponds were drained, and later people dug soil here to make bricks. "Digging the soil created huge pits," recalled a person in charge of a brick factory at the time. "The deepest pit was about 30 meters, and later this pit was dug to 380 mu."
Satellite maps show that by 2013, brick factories and deep pits were scattered throughout the lake, and Shaoxing's second-largest lake had been "dismembered."
Hejiachi's water regulation function was also greatly damaged. Villagers said that in the past, the water network around Hejiachi was crisscrossed. The Shaoxing plain is high in the south and low in the north, so when it rained, upstream water would flow from south to north, and Hejiachi, with its enormous capacity, played a powerful storage and regulation role. When Typhoon Fitow struck in 2013, because the flood-storage barrier of Hejiachi had been lost, many nearby rice fields were flooded, water entered people's homes, and it did not recede for 4 days.
2014 was even worse. Planning documents state that at that time, the combined area of brick factories and deep pits was 1966 mu, while the water area was only 729 mu. There were also enterprises building a golf course and a horse-riding arena on the drained lakebed, totaling 616 mu.
Villager Shao Linjie is waiting for a turnaround. In her heart, Hejiachi is a "mother lake." It had every kind of fish and shrimp, and it helped her family get through years of material scarcity. "I have feelings for the lake. I want to save her."
In March 2015, after more than half a year of study, the Shaoxing municipal government approved the "Comprehensive Management Plan for the Water Environment of Hejiachi." Two years later, the plan was optimized again. "The municipal government has already attached considerable importance to it," one local official commented.
At the time, Zhejiang was launching the "Five Water Co-governance" project (that is, "treating sewage, preventing floods, draining waterlogged areas, ensuring water supply and promoting water conservation" - reporter's note), and the upsurge of water treatment swept across the Jiangnan water towns. Hejiachi seemed to have grasped its last straw, but Shao Linjie soon discovered that the government's direction for management was different from what she had imagined.
In her view and that of some villagers, Hejiachi should end the pattern of "feudal lords carving up territory," channel water into the deep pits, and restore as much as possible the state before 1985.
A water conservancy engineering researcher familiar with Hejiachi's situation believed this approach had "no technical difficulty" - the water level outside Hejiachi is higher, so simply digging through the river embankments built back then would allow water to flow in naturally, "without spending too much money."
Another benefit of fully "restoring the lake" is that Hejiachi could irrigate, control floods, and settle some pollutants from upstream, reducing pollution in downstream waters.
A person in charge at the Shaoxing Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau also admitted to reporters: "In good conscience, this lake (if made continuous) would indeed be beneficial to the ecological improvement of all Shaoxing, at least under the current circumstances."
But the approved planning map added an extra road, splitting the lake surface in two. Of the original sites of existing brick factories and deep pits, some were restored to water areas, while others were marked as yellow-green squares. These squares occupied about one-third of Hejiachi's original area, totaling 1053 mu. The planning scheme explained that this large area was a "reclamation zone."
Villagers who had set their hearts on "restoring the lake" were stunned: the so-called "reclamation zone" was all water before 1985. "There was never any farmland here, so where does 'reclamation' come from?"
Land Quotas That Will Not Be Given Up
In fact, before the comprehensive management of Hejiachi had even been put on the government's agenda, these "reclamation zones" had already begun to sprout in the lake.
According to the official explanation, reclamation is meant to achieve "balance between occupation and compensation," meaning that however much construction land is used, an equivalent amount of cultivated land must be reclaimed. The construction land quotas obtained in this way are an important source of land for China's urban development.
In December 2012, Hejiachi welcomed the first reclamation zone in its thousand-year history. For two consecutive years afterward, with the approval of the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Land and Resources, another reclamation project each year was established at Hejiachi.
"Isn't this reclaiming land from the lake?" Several villagers went to government departments. Shao Linjie said the state calls for returning farmland to lakes, and laws such as the "Water Law of the People's Republic of China" explicitly prohibit reclaiming land from lakes. "How is Hejiachi doing the opposite?"
An official from the Shaoxing Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau explained to reporters that although Hejiachi used to be water surface, the nature of the land was later changed to mining land, residential land and so on. "If the farmland were restored to water surface again, the land and resources department would instead investigate."
"Shaoxing's development requires overall planning," the official said. This cannot be counted as reclaiming land from a lake.
Can a lake surface that has existed for over a thousand years simply stop being water surface just because someone says so? Shao Linjie was both amused and exasperated: "If you give a woman a man's ID card, does she become a man?" Moreover, the pumping of water and digging of soil 30 years ago were illegal in the first place. "How is it that they have instead been tacitly accepted?"
The Hejiachi management plan approved in 2015 did not shake the existence of the reclamation zones. The plan shows that in addition to the 424.5 mu of reclamation zones already approved that year, another 600 mu of reclamation area in the lake was waiting to complete project approval procedures. These reclamation zones were all located at the brick factories in the original lake and the deep pits they dug.
According to this plan, after restoration, Hejiachi's water surface area would be about 1800 mu, still less than half of what it was when the "Code for Lake Names in China" was issued in 1998.
"The state has proposed holding the red line of 1.8 billion mu of cultivated land. If there is no cultivated land left, that is also a problem," a Shaoxing official said. Reclamation involves the issue of food, "and we are also acting in the interests of the common people."
For grassroots governments, reclamation is both a task and a huge cake.
For example, Shangyu City in Shaoxing, where one reclamation project in Hejiachi is located, issued a document to township governments in 2011 stating that land turnover quotas generated from the reclamation of abandoned kiln sites and other abandoned industrial and mining sites would be rewarded at 91,000 yuan per mu. Once approved for project establishment, 50% of the reward funds would be allocated first as start-up capital.
And as long as the surplus land turnover quotas from the project are "coordinated for use by the municipal government," the subsidy received by the township would reach 100,000 yuan per mu.
Behind the rewards lies a thirst for construction land. In this southern water town of "seven parts mountains, two parts water and one part land," land is a scarce resource in Zhejiang's urban development. The aforementioned document also states at the outset that one purpose of the work is to "expand land use space" and "alleviate the shortage of land use quotas."
Keqiao District in Shaoxing, where the other two reclamation projects are located, also supports comprehensive rural land improvement in various townships, granting rewards ranging from 10,000 yuan to 70,000 yuan per mu depending on the quality grade of cultivated land.
The significance of Hejiachi's reclamation to Keqiao District is self-evident. Land and resources department data show that among the district's 42 reclamation projects from 2012 to 2016, the two Hejiachi projects took the top two places by area.
Under strong feedback from some villagers around Hejiachi, the Shaoxing municipal government adjusted the management plan here this year.
The Shaoxing Municipal Planning Bureau publicly explained that this new plan "respects history and combines it with the current situation, returning farmland, land and lake to the greatest extent possible," and connects internal and external water systems. After adjustment, Hejiachi gained 650 mu of new water surface, with a total water surface of 2460 mu - equivalent to 60% of the original water surface.
Shao Linjie found that in the new planning map, the blue areas representing water surface had indeed increased considerably, and the 4 farmland areas in the original plan had also been deleted.
But she quickly realized that these reclamation areas had not disappeared, only shifted within the lake: reclaimed farmland of roughly equal area replaced the horse-riding arena and golf course on the original lakebed.
After Changing the Nature of the Land, Dumping of Construction Waste Continues
The area of reclaimed farmland was still set at a thousand mu - about one-third of Hejiachi's original water surface. But this is not "reclamation" in the conventional sense.
Villager Zhang Shifu saw trucks loaded with construction waste heading toward the "reclamation zone." After paying the "soil dumping fee," the drivers filled the waste into the deep pits of Hejiachi.
In Shao Linjie's view, this slag was undoubtedly another "dismemberment" of Hejiachi.
A recent visit by reporters found that at the original brick factory and deep pits in the lake, garbage could be seen every few steps, including red bricks, steel bars, concrete, as well as plastic bags, glass and wooden stakes. The types of garbage were miscellaneous, and piles of garbage stretched for several meters or even dozens of meters.
The logic behind the explanation given by the Shaoxing official interviewed was similar to before. He reminded reporters that part of the land in Hejiachi was no longer water surface in nature.
The official explained that many reclamation areas were originally lakebed or deep pits, so construction waste first had to be buried as filler, and then soil had to be added on top as a cultivation layer. "Of course, toxic and harmful things cannot be dumped. As long as it is done according to the plan, there is no problem." If problems arise, the regulatory authorities should be responsible.
Dumping construction waste into Hejiachi was nothing new. In May 2013, a village by the lake signed an agreement with a company, allowing the company to contract an area of 80 mu and 700,000 cubic meters in Hejiachi for burying dry construction soil for a period of two years. The village could receive 1.7 million yuan.
At that time, Hejiachi had in effect become a paid garbage dump, and today this situation continues.
What about the yield of the "reclaimed" farmland in the lake? In a "sea of garbage" within the lake, reporters found a reclaimed wheat field of about 40 mu. This was one of the few farmland plots in the lake already put into use, and several villagers pointed out what was unusual about it.
According to the recollections of villagers interviewed, they often passed by this place but rarely saw anyone tending it. One villager asked the family that contracted the entire reclaimed wheat field, and the other party said this field required no contract fee or water and electricity fees.
"It is now May 21, 2017. Most of the nearby wheat has been harvested, but this place has not," Zhang Shifu said as he casually peeled open a few wheat kernels: "flat, empty." Looking across the field, there were many places where weeds stretched for more than ten meters at a time. The weeds grew wildly in the field, taller than the wheat.
On May 22, the contractor finally hired a harvester. According to him, this 40-mu wheat field yielded less than 10,000 jin of wet wheat, which counts as low yield. The harvesting workers at the scene also sympathized with this family: "He doesn't make much money (growing) this field."
The farmer admitted that this was his third time cultivating here. When sowing, he could not use a tractor to plow, "because there were 20 mm diameter threaded steel bars and huge stones in the field." At the time, he had to spend 6,000 yuan to hire someone to remove the construction waste.
In this wheat field after harvest, steel bars and stones more than 10 centimeters long could still be seen everywhere.
"Who grows wheat like this?" Several villagers analyzed that this plot might merely have been made to look reclaimed as required, in order to obtain farmland subsidies.
The construction waste dumped into Hejiachi was not only slag, but also mud. On the west side of the lake, Shaoxing in 2014 established a construction by-product recycling company controlled by the city's water group, with a mud treatment fee of 40 yuan per cubic meter.
This is the only mud treatment site in Shaoxing's urban area. The company said on a promotional display board that its total investment was 6.5 million yuan, that it could process mud and turn it into bricks, turning waste into treasure, and that the mud pool had a volume of 800,000 cubic meters.
The so-called mud pool was in fact the deep pit on the west side of Hejiachi. This legally packaged "invasion" once again drew opposition from some villagers.
A Newly Built Road Splits the Lake in Two
Mud came to Hejiachi along with Shaoxing's urban development.
A person in charge at the Shaoxing Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau told reporters that choosing this place for centralized mud discharge had historical reasons. "Discharge must take into account transportation, cost and so on. The deep pits of Hejiachi could just be used. At that time, Shaoxing had nowhere else."
"The whole country has the problem of mud treatment," the person in charge said. Shaoxing developed rapidly, and mud was continuously produced. Without a centralized treatment point, much mud would be secretly discharged into rivers, causing even greater harm to the environment.
The selection of Hejiachi as the mud treatment site was made in 2014, when all 6 brick factories in the lake were ordered to stop. Afterward, the co-person in charge of 4 of those brick factories saw his wholly personally owned enterprise become the second-largest shareholder of the aforementioned recycling company.
The government-led mud treatment did not cut off the source of pollution. This state-owned enterprise, which already had a mud pool, still secretly discharged 610,000 cubic meters of mud into the largest deep pit in Hejiachi during the 7 months from September 2016 to March this year - almost half of the company's claimed minimum annual mud treatment volume of 1.5 million cubic meters on its display board.
After exposure by Zhejiang media, the company's person in charge said that the mud produced and sent over by Shaoxing's urban construction exceeded its annual treatment capacity by more than 1 million cubic meters.
The momentum of urban expansion shot toward Hejiachi like an arrow. Nearby villagers saw that about 1500 meters of the Shaoxing Qunxian Road east extension project passed through Hejiachi's original lake surface, and the nearly 700 meters of roadbed already under construction was entirely solid. In the plan, only a bridge about 100 meters long was left near the center of the lake.
"For such a large lake, if there really is a need to cross it, an underpass tunnel could be used," a water conservancy engineering researcher analyzed. Directly filling it with a solid road is equivalent to splitting the lake in two, which would damage the overall ecology.
In the view of the Shaoxing officials interviewed, this road is of enormous significance, helping to connect 3 administrative districts of Shaoxing and realize an integrated development strategy. "If you want to get rich, build roads first; otherwise the three districts cannot be connected."
A Zhejiang transportation scholar familiar with this road plan believed that the nearest distance between this road and parallel routes nearby was only one or two kilometers, "a bit redundant in construction."
But Shaoxing's ambitions were not limited to the road. In the center of this 60-meter-wide avenue crossing the lake, 11 meters of land were reserved for light rail, where Metro Line 2 will pass.
This project is profoundly affecting Hejiachi's future. In the comprehensive management plan adjusted in 2017, the road crossing the lake was retained, except that the bridge at the center of the lake was lengthened by about double.
The new plan deleted the mud treatment center. The authorities stated at the beginning of this year that they planned to shut down and relocate the treatment center two years later, level the factory and cover it with greenery, and restore the transfer pool to water surface and wetlands.
Zhang Shifu hoped the center could be shut down immediately. Otherwise, at a rate exceeding its mud treatment capacity by more than 1 million cubic meters per year, it would inevitably "invade" other deep pits in the lake over the next two years. "Otherwise the mud will overflow."
Some scholars feel regret for Hejiachi. The water conservancy and ecology scholars interviewed admitted that Hejiachi's situation is not an isolated case. Across the country, many lakes have shrunk because of road building and farmland creation, and restoring the original ecology is very difficult. "But restoring 70% or 80% is still achievable."
Regarding this large lake with historical and cultural heritage, some scholars interviewed suggested that it would be advisable to "restore the lake" as much as possible, and then develop it into a tourist scenic area, which could also develop the economy.
"A plan cannot simply be called bad or good. One should see whether its advantages outweigh its disadvantages or vice versa," said an official from the Shaoxing Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau. Hejiachi should be planned on the basis of history and reality, with overall coordination and consideration, and from the perspective of Shaoxing's overall development. "From the perspective of an outsider, the government has already attached great importance to the Hejiachi issue."