Notable progress made in cleanup campaign along China's Yellow River

BEIJING -- Remarkable outcomes have been made in a special cleanup campaign that was launched in December 2018 to preserve China's Yellow River, said the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP).

The special campaign, led by the SPP and the Ministry of Water Resources, aims to regulate illegal riverside occupation, construction, mining and waste in nine provincial-level regions along the river.

Procuratorial organs had accepted 2,339 clues about violations that damage the river from water resource departments and filed 1,097 cases by the end of July 2019, said Zhang Xueqiao, deputy procurator-general of the SPP, at a press conference.

Prosecutors had issued a total of 1,029 procuratorial suggestions and filed 10 public interest litigations against illegal activities along the Yellow River.

By the end of July, about 1,707 mu (about 113.8 hectares) of polluted waters along the Yellow River had been cleaned up, 808,000 square meters of illegal construction dismantled and 1.39 million tonnes of household and construction waste removed from the river.

The 5,464-km-long Yellow River is the second-longest river in China. It originates in the northwestern province of Qinghai and runs through nine provinces and autonomous regions in western, central, northern and eastern China.