Cradle of Communist Party at centre of dead pig fiasco

For decades, the river-laced city of Jiaxing in northern Zhejiang province has prided itself as the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party.

In 1921, the party met secretly on a boat on the South Lake after their initial gathering in neighbouring Shanghai was broken up by French police.

Now the party's cradle has acquired another, far less auspicious distinction: the origin of some 20,000 pig carcasses retrieved from Shanghai's Huangpu River and other waterways stretching to the coast.

Jiaxing is the leading hog-raising centre in that part of China, and extensive media coverage of the incident has depicted a region of scattered, small-scale farms, where until recently carcasses pigs that died of disease or neglect were as likely to be sold on the black market for pork as they were to be hurled into the nearest river.

Lu Jun, Jiaxing's newly appointed party secretary, said pollution resulting from the intensive hog-raising industry had "severely damaged the local environment and its image of the birthplace of the party", the reported on Friday.

However, analysts and farmers elsewhere across the country said revelations in Jiaxing were only a small window into the problems in the mainland's pig farming industry.