2026-08-06
21 分钟The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, the vast cleanup of China's Yangtze River,
and the world enters a post-postcard era.
But first,
The Yangtze is known by many as China's Mother River.
By most measures, it's the world's third longest, running from the Tibetan Plateau to Shanghai.
It hasn't always been well looked after.
Sewage and industrial waste pouring in, and millions of tons of fish being hauled out.
In its waters, the Chinese paddlefish, a massive sword-nosed beast, went extinct.
The Baiji, a nearly blind white-bellied dolphin, probably has too.
Happily, though, things are clearing up at last.
After decades of overfishing and pollution,
the Yangtze, China's longest river, is making a remarkable comeback.
Gabriel Crossley is a China correspondent for The Economist.
Fish biomass, which is total mass of all the fish in the river,
is up by over 200% since 2021.
There are cleaner waters, so more hospitable to wildlife,
and all this seems to be down to sweeping protection measures
that China's government put in place in 2021.