-Nice face Feinberg, nice face.
Yeah, that's it.
Minu, can you duck a little bit?
I want to get his face in the window.
There we go.
That's the guy who we rely on to do our camera work.
That ape.
DAVID FEINBERG: I'm David Feinberg, and VBS sent me to
China with the camera to film the dirtiest
place on the planet.
It is the city of Linfen, and spending about a day here
breathing in the air is about the same as smoking three
packs of cigarettes.
The scary part is that there's a lot of cities
in China like this.
16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China.
And my bosses convinced me to come here and spend a week
filming and breathing in all this crap so
they don't have to.
[MUSIC- BLACK LIPS, "NAVAJO"]
Linfen produces what any nation of over a billion
people need-- a ton of energy.
It's an endless landscape of factories all spewing a bunch
of toxic chemicals into the air and poisoning the
land and the water.
There's no clouds, just a permanent toxic smog hovering
over the city.
Linfen is located in the heart of Shanxi Province.
Every day, thousands of coal trucks go between Linfen and
the rest of China's to cities.
Then they come back empty for more.
WANG HONGYING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
AILUN YANG: China suffers from both local problems and global
environmental challenges.
So the combined impacts of climate change and local
pollutions are causing enormous consequences.
A lot of the environmental problems in China are very
closely linked to our energy consumption because there's
something fundamentally wrong with the economic model.
That's why the more the economy grows, the more the
environment starts to get worse.
Linfen really shows the other side of Chinese economic
development, which is actually the ugly side of it.
And this is about how unbalanced the Chinese
development has been.
DAVID FEINBERG: The sky in Linfen was taken from a sci-fi
movie, but life there seems relatively normal.
There's 4 million people and like any other town in China,
its roads are clogged with cars and trucks, and there's a
lot of construction.
Linfen has had a bit of a PR problem ever since the World
Bank called it the most polluted place on Earth.
Even the Chinese media has reported on the disaster,
admitting that people have been moving
away because of pollution.
I didn't see anyone leaving town except
all the coal trucks.
They're actually a big source of pollution themselves, and
are everywhere.
Linfen has no tourism, and I think we were the only
foreigners in the entire city.
Everywhere we went we really struck out.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
When we pulled up to this elementary school, some kids
were leaving for the day, and it looked like there was a
huge fire burning down the neighborhood.
The kids weren't too worried, and I realize that this is
probably what they see every time they leave school, or go
outside to play.
AILUN YANG: Just take the example of air pollution.
70% of Chinese cities cannot meet
their air quality standards.
The burning of coal is the main cause of air pollution in
China, but of course the increasing transport and also
the constructions going on everywhere in China are also
reasons for air pollution.
QIU LIN: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
WANG HONGYING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
QIU LIN: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
-[SPEAKING CHINESE]
DAVID FEINBERG: When I found out I was going to Linfen, I
found some painters masks under the sink in our office.
My mom also told me I should wear a mask at all times and I
saw a lot of photos of people on the streets of Chinese
cities wearing masks.
When we got to Linfen we were surprised to find out that
nobody wore masks.
I didn't want to stick out anymore so we
left the masks behind.
However, I still took a photo wearing a mask just to show my
mom when I got home.
-Back from the waters of the Yellow Sea, far inland from
the eastern plains, for unnumbered generations,
farmers have plowed the fertile soil.
After the harvest, the plow.
And after the plow, the planting.
This has been the cycle, endlessly repeated.
Through the ages, waters from the mountains have been fed to
the fields of the valley for crops that have never failed.
One day the farmer looked up from his work in age old
fields and saw a strange new carriage.
The engineers of a far off land devised new uses for
flowing streams, producing a strange new power.
To the valley came electricity, that bring the
valley home the signs of a changing world.
DAVID FEINBERG: It was only 20 years ago that Linfen was
nicknamed the fruit and flower town of Shanxi Province.
Since then it's basically been turned into China's coal mine.
It's even more remarkable to think that this has all
happened in the span of my lifetime.
WANG HONGYING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
-[SPEAKING CHINESE]
AILUN YANG: In China over half of all
the rivers are polluted.
One third of the lakes are polluted, and over 80% or 90%
of the urban groundwater are polluted.
So this is about how serious the water
pollution is in China.
Those pollutions mainly come from industry processes.
It's about factories who do not clean up their pollutants
before they release those things into the river.
And also another main contributor is the pollutants
from the pesticide used in the agriculture process.
Most of those cancer villages are actually
caused by water pollution.
And because the people in those villages depend on this
river for their water sources, that's why you see a higher
percentage of cancer patients in those villages.
DAVID FEINBERG: All of the food I had in Linfen was
actually quite good.
It may have been full of cancerous toxins, but at least
I could tell it was grown in the ground as opposed to in
some laboratory.
I have a feeling a lot of the stuff I eat back home may be
just as bad for me.
QIU LIN: [SPEAKING CHINESE]