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A dead pig is seen in a dirty tributary of the Yangtze River, in central China's Hebei province, some 750 miles from the city of Shanghai, in a photo taken on March 12, 2013. The number of dead pigs found in the Huangpu River, which runs through China's commercial hub Shanghai, has reached more than 13,000, state media reported on March 18.

BEIJING – To the chagrin of Shanghai city residents, there’s more “pork chop soup” on the menu for the foreseeable future. 

More than a week since authorities in Shanghai started pulling thousands of dead pigs from one of the city’s major waterways, the Huangpu River, municipal authorities in that city of 23 million are continuing to pull hundreds of carcasses from its waterways each day, bringing the total since last week to over 13,000. 

Workers on Sunday pulled nearly 500 pigs from the Huangpu, bringing the total found from that river alone to over 9,500. The Huangpu River supplies over a fifth of Shanghai’s drinking water.

As the pig tally creeps up, Shanghai government officials have been struggling to put a positive spin on the ghoulish images popping up each day from the city’s waterways. 

A report Monday in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, focused on the stepped up food and water quality tests across the city. It also earnestly noted that not only have the numbers of pigs being pulled from the rivers dropped, but the size of them too.

Citing a report from Shanghai’s city government, the paper stated that two thirds of the most recent carcasses found were piglets, suggesting that the worse may have passed.

Social media outrage
Still, the daily sight of carcasses being pulled from the city’s waterways for disposal has angered the public and sparked a spirited discussion on China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo. 

Reports that many of the pigs found have tested positive for porcine circovirus, a virus that has killed large numbers of pigs in the region in recent months, has also raised suspicions about the safety of Shanghai’s water supply.

“The water must have been polluted [by these dead pigs],” wrote one user named Lujun, “Authorities are being dishonest and trying to hide something.”

“The government is as corrupt as these dead pigs,” another user using the name Ziyoudeweini wrote disgustedly. “I feel so cold. Who can we count on?” 

“Water quality in the Huangpu River has been normal up to now,” one official at the Shanghai Information Office assured NBC News Monday. He also stressed that porcine circovirus cannot be contracted by humans. 

Where are they coming from?
Shanghai officials have stepped up surveillance for dead pigs around the Huangpu River and have called upon local government in the nearby city of Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province to step up their own searches. 

Just northeast of Shanghai, Jiaxing is believed to be the source of many of the dead pigs floating down into Shanghai. Shanghai’s Information Office officials declined to speculate on whether Jiaxing was the sole source of all the pigs, but told NBC News that the prefecture was the focus of a joint Shanghai-Jiaxing investigation.

An official at the Jiaxing Environmental Protection Agency declined to comment on the progress of the investigation late Monday.

But steps were being taken in Jiaxing to curb the continued dumping of pigs into the region’s waterways. The city’s local newspaper, Jiaxing Daily, reported that leaflets had been passed out to farmers in the region, urging them to properly dispose of dead pigs with local authorities rather than quietly dumping them into the river.

Jiaxing is likely not the only community to be dumping dead pigs into its waterways, as reports indicate that porcine circovirus has spiked across farming communities this winter, killing more pigs than usual. Many have speculated that farmers have been attempting to discretely dispose of the sick pigs rather than reporting them to authorities and risk investigation.

NBC News’ Danny Zhang contributed to this report.

Related links

More than 2,800 dead pigs found in Chinese river

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BEIJING — Thousands of dead pigs, a number of them diseased, were found in Shanghai's major drinking water supply in the last two days, officials said.

According to Xinmin newspaper, 2,813 pigs were fished out of the Huangpu River, which provides drinking water for Shanghai's 23 million people. When contacted for up-to-date information on the number of pigs retrieved from the river, officials referred NBC News to the local news report.

Some of the pigs were infected with porcine circovirus (PCV) virus, according to an official statement by the Shanghai Agriculture Committee. The statement posted on China's Twitter-like social media service Weibo said that the disease would not infect humans. 

A water management officer said by telephone that results of hourly water tests were normal.  

"We are adding more chlorine as an action to protect water safety," said the official who would only identified herself as Zhu.

Water pollution, usually created by fertilizer run-off, chemical spills and untreated sewage, is a big problem in China. According to Reuters, the government will invest $850 billion over the next decade to improve the water supply system.

People from the Songjiang area of Shanghai, where many of the pigs were found, said this was not the first time they had seen the carcasses floating in the river.

Eugene Hoshiko / AP

A dead pig floats in a river on the outskirts of Shanghai on Monday.

"Am I scared? I have been hearing this kind of news all the time, so I am immune," said Songjiang resident Ma Leiying, 42, who works as a clerk at a state-owned company. "I’m sure other cities have the same problems, but the difference is the incidents have not been reported yet."

Some expressed outrage via Weibo.

"Have we been drinking dead-pig-polluted water? We are already panicked by the polluted air now we have to worry about poisoned water too," one user wrote.

Xinmin News, Shanghai’s most popular newspaper paper, reported that labels on some of the carcasses indicated that the animals had come from Zhejiang and Jiangshu provinces.   

According to Jiaxing Daily, many pigs have died in the area in recent months. In Zhulin village alone, there were 10,078 dead pigs in January, 8,325 in February, it reported.  The newspaper added that the cause of death was down to the cramped conditions the animals were kept in.

The Associated Press reported that the surge in the dumping of dead pigs came after a police campaign to curb the illegal trade in sick pig parts.

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This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 6:14 AM EDT

ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

A fishing boat runs aground on grass at Poyang Lake in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, China on Saturday. The Yangtze river is suffering from a severe drought, with the lowest level of rainfall in 5 decades.

By Eric Baculinao, NBC News’ Beijing Bureau Chief

BEIJING – “Oh waters of Honghu Lake, wave after wave. The fishermen live ever better, year after year…” are the happy lines from a popular folk song sung by communities in Hubei province who have depended on the vast lake for their economic sustenance for centuries. But now the lake is drying up in what many are calling the worst drought in more than 50 years and the song may not be heard for quite some time.   

In the neighboring province of Jiangxi, fishing boats sit eerily stranded on grassland that was once the bed of Poyang Lake, China’s largest fresh water lake, a dramatic scene that attests to the severity of south China’s 200-day drought. 

Already, the lack of rainfall and water shortages have affected 35 million people in five provinces, with some 4.2 million directly threatened by lack of drinking water, prompting authorities to adopt emergency rationing and distribution of water. 

The implications of the drought in southern China, traditionally a region with abundant water resources, have not been lost on Ma Jun, China’s leading environmentalist who has focused on the fragility of the water resource system of China for years. 
“It is a new warning signal,” said Ma, the author of “China’s Water Crisis.”

Time to re-examine China’s water policy
Ma’s seminal book is widely acknowledged as the most comprehensive and authoritative documentation of the enormous challenges facing China’s water resources. Many observers have likened Ma’s 1999 book to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which has been credited for launching environmental movement in the U.S., and believe it has done the same thing in China.  
 
“This drought tells us that water scarcity does not only exist in north China, but increasingly south China is also facing water challenges,” Ma told NBC News. “It is a new warning signal because it shows the south is no longer a store with unlimited water supply.”

He suggested China needs to re-examine its long-term water strategy and propensity for mega-projects, including the $62 billion South-North Water Diversion Project that would transfer nearly 36 billion cubic meters of water every year from China’s Yangtze River Basin and ship it to the arid north.

The gigantic water diversion project, which started in 2002 and is planned for completion in 2050, will be China’s greatest engineering project after the Great Wall, and will cost more than twice as much as the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s biggest dam.  

DAVID GRAY / Reuters

A farmer's hat is seen on a dried-up portion of an irrigation canal leading from Honghu Lake, as a fisherman manoeuvres his boat with a pole on the canal near Honghu city in central China's Hubei province on Sunday.

“We were going to divert [this] large volume of water from the Yangtze River to support north China, but now we are encountering this drought in south China, which is a warning bell for us,” Ma said.

Is the Three Gorges Dam a culprit?
For Ma, however, the more immediate issue is the possible role of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, in the current drying up of lakes and rivers in the south China region. “The Yangtze River and the lakes downstream have quite a delicate relationship,” he said, that might have been upset by the dam’s construction.

“These great lakes connected with the Yangtze River would take flood and excessive waters from the Yangtze during the rainy season, and will feed water into the Yangtze during the dry season, but now things have changed with the Three Gorges Dam,” he said, arguing that the dam has reduced the amount of water available in the lake areas.

“With lesser water running from the Yangtze into the lakes, the lakes will be losing water over time,” he added, citing the progressive shrinking of south China’s great lakes.

Referring to the flow of water from the dam to refill the lower Yangtze rivers and lakes during the dry season, he said it is “helpful in theory,” but not in practice. 

More alarming, according to Ma, is the plan to build 12 more dams on the Yangtze River and tributaries, with a combined capacity larger than the Three Gorges Dam. “It is time to review the negative impact of the Three Gorges Dam,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ma’s concerns have recently been echoed by the government which in an unprecedented statement admitted that while the Three Gorges Dam has been successful, it has also created “urgent” environmental, geological and economic problems.

Related links:

Drought parches China's 'land of fish and rice'

China confronts raft of problems at Three Gorges
 
Researcher Xu Yuan contributed to this report.