Flush of success drowns out bigger issues in rural China

Letter from Beijing: Wei Xien Shang showed me the new room in his house as if it were a new wing recently added to a royal palace. In fact, the room was a little lean-to in the corner of the Wei family's courtyard, built in the same red-brown brick as the rest of the house.

It was small, dark and bare, with little room to move about. The walls were rough plaster and the only light came from a little opening over the door.

But the new room was, nonetheless, a wonder. Its furnishing was an oval-shaped hole in the ground, with grooved footrests on either side - a basic Chinese-style toilet. It had a chain connected to a flushing mechanism that was in turn connected to a big sewage pipe that was even then being

laid down the centre of the village's main street.

Mr Wei, his wife and their two children were looking forward to the day when the whole thing would be in operation. Until then, they would go on using a hole in the ground in another corner of the courtyard, surrounded by a rough partition.

The Wei family live in Tiengozhuang, a village of almost 2,000 people. It is not, as you might imagine, in some remote mountain fastness of the vast Chinese interior, but in Fangshanxian County, only about 40km southwest of Beijing's skyscrapers and fancy restaurants. It is very close to Zhoukoudian, the site of the discovery of the famous Peking Man fossils, where people may have lived as far back as 18,000 BC. So it is no great exaggeration to say that it has taken 20,000 years for flush toilets to reach the area this summer.

One of the things China teaches westerners is how much we take sanitation for granted. In China, this is a mistake you will seldom make. All those high-minded Victorians with their concern for cleanliness as well as godliness did us a favour that no one has yet done for the majority of the Chinese population.

Even in the cities, only 70 per cent of people have sanitation facilities in their homes. In the countryside, the figure is just under 30 per cent.

That means that a majority of the entire population - an estimated 785 million people - has no access to sanitary facilities.

Public toilets in the cities tend to be unpleasant; in the countryside they are usually, in the context of a family newspaper, literally unspeakable.

The almost constant political upheaval of the Chinese 20th century meant that no one got down for any sustained period to the kind of unglamorous, long-term work, like installing sewerage systems, that makes such a difference to people's lives.

The consequences, in a densely populated country, are predictable. Official data suggest that an average of 300 million people contract food-borne diseases every year. It is estimated that about 190 million Chinese children have worms. Gastric diseases are common and serious outbreaks regularly make the headlines.

Over one hundred students in a middle school in the eastern province of Anhui came down with dysentery last week. Last month, on the first day of term, 300 students at a school in Sichuan in the south, and a few dozen at a school in Liaoning in the northeast were hit by serious food poisoning.

A few weeks later, 223 students at a school in Shaanxi, in the northwest, were hospitalised for the same reason.

None of this comes down to a general lack of concern for hygiene. Most Chinese homes, even very poor ones in the countryside, show the signs of great efforts (by the women, of course) to keep everything clean, and a spotless house is a source of great pride. But there is only so much people can do without basic facilities. Given a choice, families like the Weis are delighted to get access to sanitation. But for a majority the choice is not yet available.

Changing that is yet another in the series of immense tasks that faces the Chinese government. As in so many other areas, progress has actually been good in terms of the raw numbers, but the scale of the problem remains daunting.

The 29 per cent of people in rural areas with access to sanitation is a vast improvement since 1990 when the figure was just 7 per cent. But the government recognises that it has to move faster. It has committed itself to exceeding the UN's Millennium Development Goal by bringing safe water supplies (and thus at least the basis for a sanitation system) to 70 per cent of those in need by 2015.

Although a recent Unicef report has noted of provincial sanitation projects that "continued restructuring at provincial and county levels has resulted in downsizing and high turnover of staff, leading to weakened implementation, monitoring and management", there is little doubt that the government is serious about the issue, not least because it knows that in an underdeveloped society simple things like flushing toilets can symbolise the legitimacy of the state.

At least in the short term, the first flush of success in villages like Tiengozhuang helps to drown out bigger political questions.