The efforts help ensure the quality of water in the country's largest ever diversion project, which is to channel water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River to relieve the drought-ridden lands and people to northern China.

Shandong have set up 33 sewage treatment plants in the past few years, with their daily water disposal capacity reaching 2.06 million cubic metres to meet their responsibilities to the mammoth project.

By 2005, water quality in the Shandong section is expected to reach grade three, reaching the demanded standard.

Nansi and Dongping lakes are believed to be the worst polluted along the section in Shandong with 60 percent of the pollutant coming from industrial waste. The province has invested 1.7 billion yuan (US$206.8 million) in industrial pollution control.

In Jining, the major polluter of Nansi Lake, a total of 86 polluted water treatment projects have been established, capable of disposing 35 million tons of water a year.

Forty enterprises with paper production lines under 20,000 tons in the city were closed down by the end of November.

Statistics show in the past few years Shandong has banned or shut down 368 small polluting plants - such as cement and paper plants and mines - reducing chemical discharge by more than half a million tons.

Local bio-agriculture has quickly developed in the wake of the improvement in industrial structures.

To date six State-level and 15 provincial-level bio-agriculture demonstration counties have been set up along the water diversion route.

According to the State's general pollution-control evaluation, 8 billion yuan (US$967 million) will be spent on pollution treatment along the diversion route. The provincial water recourses department said another 30 water treatment plants and more than 114 industrial pollution control projects are still under way.

(China Daily January 9, 2002)