Years of treating Taihu Lake pay off

Efforts by Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province, to treat Taihu Lake over the past 15 years have finally paid off.

Taihu Lake is the third largest freshwater lake in China. With a surface area of about 2,338 square kilometers, it stretches across Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and is administered by Jiangsu.

In the first four months of the year, the water quality of Taihu Lake in Wuxi was better than the lake's overall water quality and the 13 main rivers running into the lake were qualified for centralized drinking water.

Wuxi plans to invest more than 10 billion yuan ($1.48 billion) to treat Taihu Lake this year. For example, there are 39 million square meters of contaminated sludge to be dredged in the Wuxi area of the lake, 18 million square meters of which will be cleared from 2021 to 2025.

The city's dredging volume and collection of blue-green algae account for 70 percent and 90 percent of the provincial totals, respectively.

In recent years, Wuxi has shut down 10,591 polluting enterprises along Taihu Lake, converted farmland and residential areas within 500 meters of Taihu Lake into protected forest and green land, and restored 51,000 mu (3,400 hectares) of wetland.

Industrial transformation and upgrading along Taihu Lake in Wuxi has also been carried out over the past few years. The city has accelerated the cultivation of the integrated circuit, internet of things, and biological medicine industries along the lake.

The Taihu Bay area is currently home to 90 percent of Wuxi's research institutes at the provincial level and above, 70 percent of high-profile talent, and 60 percent of public science service platforms. It also generates 34.3 percent of the city's high-tech industrial output.