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Foul Water and Air Part of Cost of the Boom in China's Exports
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: November 4, 2003
AIZHOU, China — The first thing that struck Shen Yunxiang when he descended into the bowels of Hisun Pharmaceutical was the smell, or rather the lack of it. It was as if the sewage system had been scrubbed with ammonia, he said, leaving only a sickly sweet aroma strong enough to overpower the stench of human waste.
In less than a minute, though, he realized that the company had exposed him to something far more noxious than feces. He had been sent, unwittingly, to release chemical runoff that Hisun had collected haphazardly beneath the factory, possibly to avoid paying fees to dispose of toxic waste.
Mr. Shen's chest constricted. His breathing grew labored, his head faint. Then Feng Huaping, his brother-in-law and fellow migrant worker, who had climbed down first, gasped, "Grab my hand, get me out," before collapsing in a puddle of muck.
Mr. Shen was the lucky one. He emerged with migraines and lung congestion, and doctors are still trying to diagnose the illness that is causing them. Mr. Feng died that night. A third migrant worker, Tang Dejun, also died in Hisun's fetid plumbing after he was sent down to finish the job the next day.
Hisun is one of China's leading exporters of pharmaceutical products, certified by the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European drug commission to sell lifesaving antitumor and cardiovascular medications for prices Western manufacturers cannot match.
But the company may pay more attention to fighting cancer in America than to protecting the health of its own workers and neighbors in Taizhou, a seaside industrial city where the air and water bear Hisun's inky signature.
Hisun declined to answer detailed written questions about the incident, as did the police in Taizhou. But a local government official confirmed the deaths, which occurred in August, and said they were the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. The official said he did not know the cause of the deaths.
Hisun has sprouted quickly, growing from a tiny state-owned drug maker to a pharmaceutical and chemical conglomerate, with shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and some powerful foreign partners. But company employees and local residents say that it has never stopped dumping untreated chemical waste around Taizhou, and that it has minimized or ignored the harmful effects of poisonous substances on its own workers.
"They were reckless to send us down there without protection," said Mr. Shen, now recuperating in a nearby hospital. "To send another guy down the next day is beyond belief. They have no regard for human life."
Such disregard appears all too common as China booms. The country's economy is growing faster than any other. But the air and water in many of its leading cities rank as the dirtiest in the world, and the number of people who die at work, 11,500 through the first nine months of this year, is far disproportionate to workplace fatalities in other countries.
Much of China's economic boom has stemmed from foreign investment and international partnership. Hisun itself has become partners with the Drug Source Company, a distributor of generic drugs based in Westchester, Ill.
The American company helped Hisun gain regulatory approval to make ingredients for a range of drugs, including the top-selling antitumor medication doxorubicin, used to treat cancer patients. The drugs sold in the United States are Hisun's most profitable product lines and are its fastest growing source of revenue, according to reports it has filed as a publicly listed company.
Drug Source did not answer phone and e-mail messages seeking comment about its relations with the company.
Hisun has undergone seven inspections by the Food and Drug Administration in recent years. They were intended to ensure that the company meets American standards for product safety. Hisun passed the inspections, and it is now certified to sell ingredients for at least eight medicines to the United States, all distributed by Drug Source.
Eli Lilly & Company has also joined with Hisun to produce Lilly's drug capreomycin, used to fight resistant strains of tuberculosis. Similar alliances have helped Hisun crack the European market for pravastatin sodium, which lowers cholesterol levels in heart patients.
A spokesman for Eli Lilly said the company had no knowledge of environmental or safety problems at Hisun. The F.D.A. declined to answer questions about its inspections of Hisun or its certification process.
Hisun's case suggests that the enormous human and environmental toll of China's rapid development is not just an unintended side effect but also an explicit choice of business executives and officials who tolerate deaths and degradation as the inevitable price of progress.
Taizhou's main industrial area, Yantou, where the Jiaojiang River meets the East China Sea, was historically popular among fishermen, who used the river as a sheltered harbor.
In the mid-1980's, the local government renamed the area the Yantou Pharmaceutical Chemical Industry Zone, with state-owned Hisun as the anchor tenant. Authorities built concrete barricades along the beach to protect factories from the tides, rendering parts of the seashore inaccessible.
Hisun initially focused on the Chinese market and produced antiparasite medicines used by veterinarians to treat farm animals. But during the past several years, it has ventured into foreign markets with the help of its North American allies.
Powered by exports, Hisun's sales are on track to hit $150 million this year, and its campus of white-and-blue tiled factories and offices has expanded to cover dozens of acres along the waterfront.
Yet one of Hisun's comparative advantages seems to be that it does not spend much money to treat toxic chemicals that are byproducts of producing these drugs.
Internal reports by local and national environmental investigators have found that each year, Hisun and other nearby companies release 3.6 million tons of water laden with organic and inorganic compounds that receive little or no processing.
Yantou's shoreline is edged with sludge. Inland, the air is sulfureous. Fishermen say river water and seawater causes their hands and legs to become ulcerated, in some extreme cases requiring amputation.
Some 1,700 villagers have left the area around Yantou in recent years, according to one national environmental report, which also showed elevated rates of cancer and respiratory disease among residents.
The effect on some of Hisun's own employees has also been severe.
Until recently Cao Hongshai was a Hisun assembly-line worker who made a deworming medicine that the F.D.A. approved for sale in the United States.
Ms. Cao said she used toluene, a toxic solvent, to produce the active ingredient in the drug. But she wore only a blue cotton uniform and worked in a room that had no special ventilation.
Ms. Cao says she has not suffered health problems except for irregular periods. But two years ago she gave birth to a girl who had stubs where eight of her fingers should have been.
Ms. Cao and her husband, Lin Jianyong, sued Hisun for damages. A report submitted to the court by the government-run Medical Information Institute in Zhejiang Province found a "clear correlation" between the child's defects and the chemicals used at Hisun.
But local courts have consistently supported Hisun, and Mr. Lin and Ms. Cao have nearly exhausted the family's savings fighting the company.
Ms. Cao and Mr. Lin included "Hisun" in their daughter's name, so their daughter would always know that her deformity was the company's fault.
Local government officials have recently taken steps to clean up Yantou. Authorities opened a waste-water treatment facility just a short walk from Hisun's campus, and local companies are now required to channel their runoff there and pay for it to be processed.
Beijing has also expressed alarm. After two reporters for the New China News Agency wrote an unpublished internal report revealing Yantou's environment woes, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao ordered environmental and safety agencies to investigate, according to people who say they were told of the prime minister's intervention.
But by the accounts of Hisun employees and some local officials, the company became adept at fending off such inquiries.
On Aug. 14, word spread at Hisun that a central government inspection team was to arrive from Beijing. Employees said their managers became unusually active in seeking to clean up the facility.
Mr. Shen, the migrant worker who handled construction jobs for Hisun, noticed people bustling about the factory that day. But it was not until night that he and Mr. Feng were recruited to help the company prepare for inspections.
A boss came looking for Mr. Feng at the temporary shacks where he and Mr. Shen lived, together with their wives and young children, all of them migrants from southwestern Sichuan Province. Hisun's plant is nearby, across a foul-smelling canal that provides shipping passage to the sea.
The boss explained that Hisun had a problem that needed immediate attention. Mr. Feng, who led his own construction brigade, was told to pick a colleague and bring flashlights, a sledgehammer and a drill. Mr. Feng roused Mr. Shen, his brother-in-law.
Mr. Shen said the boss told them what to do. They were to knock down barricades that had been built inside Hisun's sewage system to redirect the flow of liquid waste. He did not explain why.
It seems quite likely, some other employees and local residents said, that the company had diverted waste water to avoid paying fees to have it processed, and that pending inspections prompted the company to restore the flow.
Mr. Feng stripped off his shirt and climbed down a manhole. Mr. Shen followed a few steps behind. He said he expected to smell human waste, but instead encountered the light chemical odor. He felt dizzy.
Mr. Feng had just begun working below when he cried out and reached for help. Mr. Shen grabbed his bare arm, wet and slippery, and pulled with all his strength. He tugged so hard that he bit off the tip of his tongue. The shot of pain in his mouth is his last memory that night.
When Mr. Shen regained consciousness two days later, blurry and disoriented in the hospital, he asked for Mr. Feng. He was told his brother-in-law was dead.
So were Mr. Tang, the other migrant construction worker who followed them into the drainage pipes the second night, and a security guard involved in a rescue attempt.
A local government official, Mr. Wang, who declined to provide his full name or have his title used, said a deputy general manager of Hisun and a lower level official in charge of the drainage system were under investigation.
Hisun itself was fined the equivalent of $5,400 for the incident, this official said. Relatives of Mr. Feng said Hisun paid them $20,500 compensation.
The local official said Bai Hua, Hisun's chief executive, was also assessed a personal fine. But neither Mr. Bai nor his company have said anything publicly about the incident.
In October Mr. Bai headed his company's delegation to a major pharmaceutical convention in Frankfurt, where it promoted its line of drugs to fight heart disease, certified safe by the European Union.
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: November 4, 2003
AIZHOU, China — The first thing that struck Shen Yunxiang when he descended into the bowels of Hisun Pharmaceutical was the smell, or rather the lack of it. It was as if the sewage system had been scrubbed with ammonia, he said, leaving only a sickly sweet aroma strong enough to overpower the stench of human waste.
In less than a minute, though, he realized that the company had exposed him to something far more noxious than feces. He had been sent, unwittingly, to release chemical runoff that Hisun had collected haphazardly beneath the factory, possibly to avoid paying fees to dispose of toxic waste.
Mr. Shen's chest constricted. His breathing grew labored, his head faint. Then Feng Huaping, his brother-in-law and fellow migrant worker, who had climbed down first, gasped, "Grab my hand, get me out," before collapsing in a puddle of muck.
Mr. Shen was the lucky one. He emerged with migraines and lung congestion, and doctors are still trying to diagnose the illness that is causing them. Mr. Feng died that night. A third migrant worker, Tang Dejun, also died in Hisun's fetid plumbing after he was sent down to finish the job the next day.
Hisun is one of China's leading exporters of pharmaceutical products, certified by the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European drug commission to sell lifesaving antitumor and cardiovascular medications for prices Western manufacturers cannot match.
But the company may pay more attention to fighting cancer in America than to protecting the health of its own workers and neighbors in Taizhou, a seaside industrial city where the air and water bear Hisun's inky signature.
Hisun declined to answer detailed written questions about the incident, as did the police in Taizhou. But a local government official confirmed the deaths, which occurred in August, and said they were the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. The official said he did not know the cause of the deaths.
Hisun has sprouted quickly, growing from a tiny state-owned drug maker to a pharmaceutical and chemical conglomerate, with shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and some powerful foreign partners. But company employees and local residents say that it has never stopped dumping untreated chemical waste around Taizhou, and that it has minimized or ignored the harmful effects of poisonous substances on its own workers.
"They were reckless to send us down there without protection," said Mr. Shen, now recuperating in a nearby hospital. "To send another guy down the next day is beyond belief. They have no regard for human life."
Such disregard appears all too common as China booms. The country's economy is growing faster than any other. But the air and water in many of its leading cities rank as the dirtiest in the world, and the number of people who die at work, 11,500 through the first nine months of this year, is far disproportionate to workplace fatalities in other countries.
Much of China's economic boom has stemmed from foreign investment and international partnership. Hisun itself has become partners with the Drug Source Company, a distributor of generic drugs based in Westchester, Ill.
The American company helped Hisun gain regulatory approval to make ingredients for a range of drugs, including the top-selling antitumor medication doxorubicin, used to treat cancer patients. The drugs sold in the United States are Hisun's most profitable product lines and are its fastest growing source of revenue, according to reports it has filed as a publicly listed company.
Drug Source did not answer phone and e-mail messages seeking comment about its relations with the company.
Hisun has undergone seven inspections by the Food and Drug Administration in recent years. They were intended to ensure that the company meets American standards for product safety. Hisun passed the inspections, and it is now certified to sell ingredients for at least eight medicines to the United States, all distributed by Drug Source.
Eli Lilly & Company has also joined with Hisun to produce Lilly's drug capreomycin, used to fight resistant strains of tuberculosis. Similar alliances have helped Hisun crack the European market for pravastatin sodium, which lowers cholesterol levels in heart patients.
A spokesman for Eli Lilly said the company had no knowledge of environmental or safety problems at Hisun. The F.D.A. declined to answer questions about its inspections of Hisun or its certification process.
Hisun's case suggests that the enormous human and environmental toll of China's rapid development is not just an unintended side effect but also an explicit choice of business executives and officials who tolerate deaths and degradation as the inevitable price of progress.
Taizhou's main industrial area, Yantou, where the Jiaojiang River meets the East China Sea, was historically popular among fishermen, who used the river as a sheltered harbor.
In the mid-1980's, the local government renamed the area the Yantou Pharmaceutical Chemical Industry Zone, with state-owned Hisun as the anchor tenant. Authorities built concrete barricades along the beach to protect factories from the tides, rendering parts of the seashore inaccessible.
Hisun initially focused on the Chinese market and produced antiparasite medicines used by veterinarians to treat farm animals. But during the past several years, it has ventured into foreign markets with the help of its North American allies.
Powered by exports, Hisun's sales are on track to hit $150 million this year, and its campus of white-and-blue tiled factories and offices has expanded to cover dozens of acres along the waterfront.
Yet one of Hisun's comparative advantages seems to be that it does not spend much money to treat toxic chemicals that are byproducts of producing these drugs.
Internal reports by local and national environmental investigators have found that each year, Hisun and other nearby companies release 3.6 million tons of water laden with organic and inorganic compounds that receive little or no processing.
Yantou's shoreline is edged with sludge. Inland, the air is sulfureous. Fishermen say river water and seawater causes their hands and legs to become ulcerated, in some extreme cases requiring amputation.
Some 1,700 villagers have left the area around Yantou in recent years, according to one national environmental report, which also showed elevated rates of cancer and respiratory disease among residents.
The effect on some of Hisun's own employees has also been severe.
Until recently Cao Hongshai was a Hisun assembly-line worker who made a deworming medicine that the F.D.A. approved for sale in the United States.
Ms. Cao said she used toluene, a toxic solvent, to produce the active ingredient in the drug. But she wore only a blue cotton uniform and worked in a room that had no special ventilation.
Ms. Cao says she has not suffered health problems except for irregular periods. But two years ago she gave birth to a girl who had stubs where eight of her fingers should have been.
Ms. Cao and her husband, Lin Jianyong, sued Hisun for damages. A report submitted to the court by the government-run Medical Information Institute in Zhejiang Province found a "clear correlation" between the child's defects and the chemicals used at Hisun.
But local courts have consistently supported Hisun, and Mr. Lin and Ms. Cao have nearly exhausted the family's savings fighting the company.
Ms. Cao and Mr. Lin included "Hisun" in their daughter's name, so their daughter would always know that her deformity was the company's fault.
Local government officials have recently taken steps to clean up Yantou. Authorities opened a waste-water treatment facility just a short walk from Hisun's campus, and local companies are now required to channel their runoff there and pay for it to be processed.
Beijing has also expressed alarm. After two reporters for the New China News Agency wrote an unpublished internal report revealing Yantou's environment woes, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao ordered environmental and safety agencies to investigate, according to people who say they were told of the prime minister's intervention.
But by the accounts of Hisun employees and some local officials, the company became adept at fending off such inquiries.
On Aug. 14, word spread at Hisun that a central government inspection team was to arrive from Beijing. Employees said their managers became unusually active in seeking to clean up the facility.
Mr. Shen, the migrant worker who handled construction jobs for Hisun, noticed people bustling about the factory that day. But it was not until night that he and Mr. Feng were recruited to help the company prepare for inspections.
A boss came looking for Mr. Feng at the temporary shacks where he and Mr. Shen lived, together with their wives and young children, all of them migrants from southwestern Sichuan Province. Hisun's plant is nearby, across a foul-smelling canal that provides shipping passage to the sea.
The boss explained that Hisun had a problem that needed immediate attention. Mr. Feng, who led his own construction brigade, was told to pick a colleague and bring flashlights, a sledgehammer and a drill. Mr. Feng roused Mr. Shen, his brother-in-law.
Mr. Shen said the boss told them what to do. They were to knock down barricades that had been built inside Hisun's sewage system to redirect the flow of liquid waste. He did not explain why.
It seems quite likely, some other employees and local residents said, that the company had diverted waste water to avoid paying fees to have it processed, and that pending inspections prompted the company to restore the flow.
Mr. Feng stripped off his shirt and climbed down a manhole. Mr. Shen followed a few steps behind. He said he expected to smell human waste, but instead encountered the light chemical odor. He felt dizzy.
Mr. Feng had just begun working below when he cried out and reached for help. Mr. Shen grabbed his bare arm, wet and slippery, and pulled with all his strength. He tugged so hard that he bit off the tip of his tongue. The shot of pain in his mouth is his last memory that night.
When Mr. Shen regained consciousness two days later, blurry and disoriented in the hospital, he asked for Mr. Feng. He was told his brother-in-law was dead.
So were Mr. Tang, the other migrant construction worker who followed them into the drainage pipes the second night, and a security guard involved in a rescue attempt.
A local government official, Mr. Wang, who declined to provide his full name or have his title used, said a deputy general manager of Hisun and a lower level official in charge of the drainage system were under investigation.
Hisun itself was fined the equivalent of $5,400 for the incident, this official said. Relatives of Mr. Feng said Hisun paid them $20,500 compensation.
The local official said Bai Hua, Hisun's chief executive, was also assessed a personal fine. But neither Mr. Bai nor his company have said anything publicly about the incident.
In October Mr. Bai headed his company's delegation to a major pharmaceutical convention in Frankfurt, where it promoted its line of drugs to fight heart disease, certified safe by the European Union.
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