The success of clean river campaign: Reviving an idyllic life in Shanghai outskirts
Reeds that serve to purify water move in an autumn breeze amid a pocket park in western Shanghai.
A book in hand, I walked into a pocket park near my suburban home on a cool Wednesday morning, in the middle of an eight-day holiday that ended on October 6.
The moment I sat by a rectangular pond spangled with cattails and reeds, the scent of these wild plants wafted through the air. I stood up, walked around and breathed in.
It was the first time I had caught the autumn aroma of such unspectacular plants. The reeds rose above my chest in most cases and waved in a gentle mid-fall breeze, nourished as they were by clear water gurgling over pebbles and wrought-iron fences toward some ancient rivers outside the mini park.
The park was uncrowded, as many local residents had traveled out of town to explore remote landscapes in the Golden Week combining the Mid-Autumn Festival that fell on September 29 and the ensuing weeklong National Day holiday.
Amid the rare and refreshing scent of ripening reeds, I settled down on a wooden bench to read. Slowly I turned the pages, while sometimes watching sunlight fading through the reed stalks into the pebbled beds of the pond.
My thoughts wandered through the book, which depicts natural beauty in a reminiscent mood, to what was surrounding me in reality: waving reeds, whispering leaves, and sloping grasslands. What a soothing scene for my mind and eyes, which had often been burdened by time-consuming work on the computer.
A girl poses for pictures on a sloping grassland in the pocket park.
The morning slid away without my notice as I indulged in the book. I lifted my eyes from the pages only when I heard someone screaming from a distance: "I've got it! I've got it!"
As I looked around, I saw two little girls giggling on a lakeside plaza. Their twittering sound seemed to be a timely signal for me to take a break from reading.
It was near noon, so I put my book back into the bag and walked toward the girls. As I went closer, I found one of them squatting by the lake, her hands holding two pieces of paper boards bent into the shape of a cup.
"What have you got?" I asked the girl, who was cautiously moving her improvised "paper cup" on the grassy ground, lest something would slip from it.
She didn't reply, her eyes focused and her hands readied.
As I was about to leave, she stood up and sashayed toward me.
"Look, a huge spider I've never seen before!" she exclaimed, thrusting her cup-shaped paper net forward for me to see.
"Wow, I would say it's huge; it's almost as big as my thumb nail!" I echoed her excitement. "And what are you going to do with the spider?"
Again, she didn't reply. Turning on her heel, she rushed toward the other girl. In half a minute, they set the spider free in a bush.
It was a merry morning: Nature had disclosed her charm before the discerning eye. However small our neighborhood park was, it gave us a world in which both local adults and adolescents had learned to appreciate what nature holds in store for us.
Wasteland reclaimed
About six years ago, the site of the pocket park was still a wasteland, wedged between several newly built residential communities, including one I lived in. At that time, on my way to shopping at a local wet market, I would pass by the forbidding wasteland, on which one could hardly set foot on – the ground was muddled, and so were some brooks nearby.
A turning point came in 2017 when Shanghai launched a citywide campaign to clean up rivers and riverside areas. The city decided it would have converted more than half of its total area into "clean river valleys" by 2025.
The pocket park, luxuriantly full of trees, reeds and shrubs, attests to the city's effort to clean up communal environments.
The pocket park near my home in Shanghai's western suburb is the fruit of the community clean-up campaign carried out across the city over the past six years. The small park sits on one of the 152 rivers crisscrossing Zhaoxiang Town, Qingpu District. The latest local official statistics show that water quality is now ranked good to excellent in more than 95 percent of these rivers.
"We've just rented an apartment in your residential community because we like the ecological landscape here," a 40-something man told me on Wednesday when we chanced upon each other in the park. He said he was accompanying his teenage son who had come to the park for sword practice.
"My son suffers from chronic asthma and is very sensitive to air quality," he explained. "That's why we decided to move here about half a year ago. I hope we can eventually buy an apartment in the vicinity – maybe no later than next year."
A river reborn
Within a short radius of our community park flows an ancient river, which encompasses several archeological sites dating back more than 6,000 years.
A number of bucolic villages are located around those sites and along the Laotongbotang river, which has nourished local land for more than 1,000 years.
About three years ago, in a field study of Shanghai's rural revitalization, I visited the ancient river at several riverside villages not far away from my home. I witnessed workers lining the riverbanks with new saplings and the riverbeds with waterborne plants to clean the water and adjacent areas that had somehow been polluted by human footprints.
A heron flies over old and new bridges on an ancient river.
When I revisited the same riverside villages about a fortnight ago, I was surprised to see a river reborn.
The ancient waterway had a glassy green surface and was luxuriantly full of canna lilies and some other waterborne plants designed to purify water. On both banks, a number of ecological parks had taken shape, featuring a rich variety of trees and shrubs. An organic farm using zero chemical fertilizers had doubled in size.
"I couldn't find fish or shrimps in the past, when the river was dirty, but look, now I can harvest a basket of them, because the water is much better," a young man in a red jacket told me. "Many aquatic creatures are extremely sensitive to water quality. You won't see, let alone catch them if water is polluted."
He was fishing under a stone bridge built in the 18th century when I saw him spreading a net into the river.
"Now I can even get some crabs from the river," he said merrily.
A glimpse at an ecological island in a riverside village
About 200 meters away from where the young man stood was a row of farmers' houses with white walls and black tiled roofs, surrounded by small patches of vegetable fields. A suntanned farmer in his 70s was tilling the soil when I approached and struck a conversation.
"Is the river cleaner than before?" I asked.
"Sure!" he replied. "We used to dispose of some waste along the river, but we no longer do so. Look at all those waterborne plants and newly paved country roads. Ain't they cute?"
An ancient river is flanked by trees, waterborne plants and farmers' houses.
Cute indeed. Refreshed by a countryside breeze, I bade farewell to the suntanned farmer and began to explore the riverside landscape back and forth, covering several kilometers on foot.
Later, I came to know that the ancient river I explored that day had just been ranked among Shanghai's most beautiful rivers.
The glassy surface of a clean ancient river, which flows through many bucolic villages not far away from the author's suburban home
An ancient river close to the author's home has become cleaner thanks in part to the purifying effect of various waterborne plants.
The rebirth of an ancient river goes a long way toward reviving an idyllic life typical of traditional Chinese communities, where homes are made to nestle in nature.
In a high-profile meeting held in September, Shanghai announced it will further improve the ecology "at one's doorstep" in the next five years, among other things, in order to build a beautiful city.
In many ways, cleaning up the communal environment amounts to building "the last mile" of a city in search of palpable beauty.
Young people walk on a revamped old street by an ancient river during the National Day holiday.
