Polluters along two of China?s main rivers have defied over a decade of clean-up efforts, leaving much of the water unfit to touch, let alone drink, and a risk to a sixth of the population, state media said yesterday.

Half the check points along the Huai River and its tributaries in central and eastern China showed pollution of ?Grade 5? or worse ? the top of the dial in key toxins, meaning that the water was unfit for human contact and may not be fit even for irrigation, national legislators were told.

Fourteen years of measures had reined in some of the worst pollution along the Huai and Liao Rivers but factory waste remained far too high, chairman of the National People?s Congress environment and resources protection committee Mao Rubai said in a report delivered on Sunday.

<B>Huai, worst polluted tributaries</B>

The rivers posed a ?threat to the water safety of one sixth of the country?s 1.3 billion population?, the China Daily said. The pollution on the Huai threatened the massive South-North Water Transfer Project to draw water from the Yangtze River through the Huai basin to the country?s parched north, Mao said.

?Large volumes of untreated domestic effluent and industrial waste-water are dumped directly into the river,? Mao said of one of the Huai?s worst polluted tributaries, according to the NPC Web site (www.npc.gov.cn).

?To judge from the inspection, the quality of water used for the South-North Water Transfer Pro-ject is threatened by pollution, and this must attract our vigilance.? Mao?s call for stricter standards and enforcement came as government leaders promised to lift ceilings on fines for polluters.

But Mao went one step further, warning that even factories that met pollution limits were still dumping too many chemicals to rescue rivers. ?This situation is directly related to the fact that water pollution standards for some of our country?s industries are too low,? he said.

Even if standards were met, the volume of toxins entering the Huai ?far exceeds the capacity of the river basin to replenish itself and will inevitably create pollution?, he said. The eastern route of the transfer project is scheduled to begin pumping water in 2008, but plans to reduce pollution in Jiangsu province have not been implemented. ?The quality of the transferred water will be very difficult to ensure,? said Mao. The Liao River in China?s northeast also remains beset by polluters, with large volumes of untreated waste flowing through it into the sea. Mao said that officials along both rivers had only used some of the funds set aside for pollution treatment projects.

DIPLOMATIC VISIT

<B>Merkel presses China on climate change</B>

German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged China yesterday to do more to halt climate change, prompting the response that the developed West has been polluting the skies for much longer than the newly developing Chinese. Merkel is on her second visit to China as Chancellor and the trip comes four months before world environment ministers meet in Bali to try to launch new talks to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. She pressed for stronger protection of intellectual property rights and said the ground rules for gathering resources should be the same worldwide, an apparent criticism of China's relations with Sudan. China has sizeable economic interests in Sudan and has been under pressure to take a more critical approach to Khartoum after accusations aid from Beijing feeds violence in Darfur. Premier Wen Jiabao said China would do everything it could to fight product piracy but that there were differences concerning climate change.

?The Chinese wish, like all people, for blue skies, green hills and clear water,? he told a joint news conference. He said the task of reducing emissions was tougher in China than in Germany because it had more people had not yet reached economic growth of industrialised countries in terms of GDP per capita. ?China has taken part of the responsibility for climate change for only 30 years while industrial countries have grown fast for the last 200 years,? he said. Merkel will meet President Hu Jintao later and heads to Japan on Wednesday where she will also address climate change and economic issues.