"Mr. Wu, a jaunty, 40-year-old former factory salesman, pioneered a style of intrepid, media-savvy environmental work that made Lake Tai, and the hundreds of chemical factories on its shores, the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny.
In 2005 he was declared an “Environmental Warrior” by the National People’s Congress. His address book contained cellphone numbers for officials in Beijing and the provincial capital of Nanjing who outranked the party bosses where he lived.
But Mr. Wu was far from untouchable. He lost his job. His wife lost hers. The police summoned, detained and interrogated him. The local government and factory owners also tried for years to bring him into the fold with contracts, gifts and jobs. When party officials offered him a chance to profit handsomely from a pollution cleanup contract, a friend warned him not to accept. Mr. Wu, who needed the money, said yes.
The country’s third largest freshwater body, Lake Tai, or Taihu in Chinese, has long provided the people of the lower Yangtze River Delta with both their wealth and their conception of natural beauty.
It nurtured a bounty of the “three whites,” white shrimp, whitebait and whitefish, and a freshwater crustacean delicacy called the hairy crab. Natural and man-made streams irrigated rice paddies, and a network of canals ferried that produce far and wide.
Along the lake’s northern reaches, near the city of Wuxi, placid waters and misty hills captured the imagination of Chinese for hundreds of years. The wealthy built gardens that featured the lake’s wrinkled, water-scarred limestone rocks set in groves of bamboo and chrysanthemum."