Polluted, poisonous and immune to popular efforts to enforce a clean-up: Tai Lake is a metaphor for the state of China's politics

The Economist, May 11.-  The plain-clothes police are always there, watching Xu Jiehua. When she goes out, two of them follow by motorcycle. Sometimes an unmarked car joins them, tailing her closely on the narrow road winding past the factories and wheat fields around her village.

Ms Xu is used to the attention. Her husband, Wu Lihong, was arrested in April last year and sentenced four months later to three years in prison for [alleged] fraud and blackmail. For her, the police harassment is proof that the charges were false, and that Mr Wu's only crime was to anger local officials with his tireless campaigning against pollution around nearby Tai Lake, China's third-biggest freshwater body. It is also a warning that she too should keep quiet.

Last year nature appeared to vindicate Mr Wu. Soon after his arrest, the lake was choked by toxic algae fed by the phosphates from the human and industrial waste that had been poured into the water and its tributaries. For more than a week, the stinking growth disrupted the water supply of 2m people living on its shores. It was one of China's biggest environmental scandals since the Communist Party came to power.

A higher municipal court rejected Mr Wu's appeal last November. Last month Ms Xu submitted an appeal to a court in Nanjing, the capital of their province, Jiangsu. But she says she has no hope of success. The polluting companies her husband campaigned against remain open ...

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