I have to disagree. I am living in China for the past 4 years and I can see the effort put into pollution and environmental control taking place with my own eyes.
Anyang is my adopted city and Henan is considered the most polluted province in China.
Anyang river is just 500m from my home and when I first came to live in this city it was a dead muddy river bed. Today it's a living water and very clean when compared to its past not too long ago.
Street cleaning cycle is not once a day. It's 24 hours with shifts.
In August last year my wife and I toured jiangnan and marvelled at the glossy skyscraper Shanghai. As tourists we walked along Shanghai Bund, and at night went on the river cruise.
At no instance did we see streets, roads, river cluttered with rubbish. This is the same in the other cities we visited; Ningbo, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou. They are all very clean, and being a Singaporean I have standards to compare what is clean.
So the China that you know is not the China that I am living in.
I have. In 2015. Cleanliness is relative.
Have you looked into the Huangpu river right under the iconic pudong skyline that looks so pristine in glossy posters? You are unlikely to find rivers that streaming with discarded flotsam in most of the developed world.
Also, the streets in Shanghai may be washed and swept once a day, but the amount of debris and detritus customarily tossed offhandedly by the residents are such that the streets are nonetheless more littered by far than is commonly encountered in most developed cities.
