An unspoken quest

Every day at 4 pm, what-ever the weather, Zhang Haiqing begins patrolling the river near his home in the Jianggan district of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in East China. Zhang is unable to speak because he had his larynx removed after being diagnosed with cancer, so he communicates by writing messages on a type of magnetic drawing board usually used by children. He checks the river carefully and uses the board to point out areas of pollution or river cleaners who are not doing their job properly. He also takes photos and reports problems to the local authorities.

The 64-year-old started his official patrol in April 2014 after being hired as one of the first of 47 civil river chiefs by the Hangzhou government in March of the same year. He had only been working for a month when he had the surgery on his larynx, but that didn't prevent him from fulfilling his responsibilities - supervising river protection projects and pollution control. In fact, he regularly works far longer than necessary, even though there are at least 582 civil river chiefs in Hangzhou.

Zhang's patrol actually began as an irregular activity in 2009, when he moved to his current home and found the nearby river was black and smelled rank. "Day and night, the smell was so strong it often woke me up," he recalled.

During some free time, he used his electric bicycle to follow drainage pipes and identify the sources of the pollution. When he finally tracked them down, he reported their positions to the local river protection authority. The process consumed many of his leisure hours. "At the time, I often failed to find him and wondered where he was," recalled his wife, Zhang Chunhua.

Zhang Haiqing's desire to protect the river grew stronger when he became a civil river chief. "It was shortly after he had surgery on his throat, and he still had to spend 30 minutes riding his electric bicycle to the hospital for chemotherapy. I was worried about his health, so I asked him to relinquish his work as civil river chief for a few days, but he got angry," his wife said. "He paid more attention to the river than tome."

In reply to her request to slow down and conserve his energy, Zhang Haiqing wrote on his drawing board: "I just want to do it."

Since 2009, he has made nearly 100 proposals about river protection, with 20 percent of them coming after he became a river chief.

When asked why he cares so much about the river, he wrote: "I grew up in Nanxingqiao (in Hangzhou). The 2-meter-deep river there was so clean you could easily see the bottom. For the sake of future generations, we have to guarantee the quality of the water."