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GUANGZHOU -- China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) has said it will stand firm in combating government-backed violations that have set back the country's environment protection efforts in recent years.

"The administration has set up two regional environment watchdogs in Guangzhou and Shanghai, and will launch another three in Chengdu, Xi'an and Shenyang over the next four months to ensure local governments abide by environment protection laws and regulations and meet relevant standards in regional economic development," said Zhang Lijun, a deputy director of SEPA.

"This is an important step to remove local protectionism, a major obstacle in our law enforcement," he told an internal meeting on Wednesday in Guangzhou, where the south China environment watchdog was launched three years ago.

The south China watchdog has mediated over a number of inter-provincial pollution disputes and helped local authorities solve several severe pollution incidents, including the cadmium spill along the Beijiang River in Guangdong Province in December 2005 that threatened the local drinking and agricultural water supplies, said Zhang Jianming, head of the organization.

Cadmium, a metallic element widely used in batteries, can cause liver and kidney damage and lead to bone diseases. Compounds containing cadmium are also carcinogenic.

China suffered a string of environmental disasters last year, including a lead poisoning accident caused by a factory in the northwestern Gansu Province last April that hospitalized around 250 children aged under 14 and left hundreds of others with excessive amounts of lead in the blood.

Last September, two factories in Yueyang City of central China's Hunan Province flushed waste water with a high concentration of arsenide into the Xinqiang River, affecting the water supply for 80,000 residents in the lower reaches.

"Governments are almost always behind these seemingly corporate behaviors - local authorities sometimes tolerate environmental violations, driven by the need to boost economic growth," said Pan Yue, another SEPA deputy director, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

He said the governments' refusal or failure to fulfil environmental responsibilities and interference in environmental law enforcement are the main reasons for some of China's persistent environmental problems.

In the run-up to the annual parliament session set to open next Monday, Pan urged China's legislature to amend its 17-year-old environmental law to hold government officials accountable for pollution.

The law should specify and emphasize the government's responsibility in environmental protection and impose harsher punishments, he said.

Chinese environmental officials and media have frequently lambasted local authorities for rampant environmental violations and called for serious punishments for negligent officials.

To counter local protectionism, the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee has announced that environmental protection will be an important index for assessing local officials' performance starting from 2007.

Investigations have shown that most of China's rivers and lakes are polluted. Almost half the ground water in urban areas is heavily polluted.

Of 222 drinkable water resources in 113 major Chinese cities, only 72 percent reached national standards.

Last year, China failed to reach its pollution control targets, which officials attributed to a faster-than-expected 10.7 percent GDP growth and higher energy consumption.

In 2006, China's sulphur dioxide emissions increased by nearly 463,000 tons, 1.8 percent higher than the previous year, while Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), a water pollution index, reached 14.31 million tons, 173,000 tons more and 1.2 percent higher than 2005.

The country aims to reduce the emission of major pollutants by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010 and the government had sought to cut the two main pollutants by 2 percent in 2006.

This year, China aims to reduce its sulphur dioxide emission and COD by 3.2 million tons and 1.23 million tons respectively, according to SEPA.