Chinese representatives to the country's legislature have expressed fears that pollution from booming industries is killing much of the marine life in the country's eastern Bohai Sea.
BEIJING — Chinese representatives to the country's legislature have expressed fears that pollution from booming industries is killing much of the marine life in the country's eastern Bohai Sea, the government said Thursday.
Eastern China's rapidly growing cities and industrial centers are dumping pollutants into the 78,000-square kilometer (31,200-square mile) body of water, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted representative Liu Quanfang as saying.
Liu said almost none of the more than 40 rivers that run into the Bohai Sea are clean, and that 2.8 billion tons of contaminated water gets dumped into it each year, the agency reported.
Liu told Xinhua the pollution was poisoning spawning grounds for many species of fish and other marine life, and could make the Bohai sea virtually "dead" within a dozen years.
Liu and other members of the National Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference -- an advisory body to China's legislature -- expressed their concerns about the Bohai Sea at their annual 10-day meeting, currently being held in Beijing, Xinhua said.
Xie Kechang, another member of the National Committee and a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, proposed setting up an administrative body, made up of central government and provincial officials, to combat the problem, Xinhua said.
Citing China's Ministry of Agriculture and State Environmental Protection Administration, the agency said the amount of heavy metals detected in the mud of the sea's floor is 2,000 times the national standard.
The Bohai Sea has 26 cities and about a hundred ports along its 3,780-kilometers (2,350 miles) of coastline, the report said.
Bohai is connected into the open sea between China and the Korean peninsula.
Source: Associated Press
Contact Info:
