83% of Chinese urban tap water safe to drink

Up to 83 percent of China's urban drinking water is safe to drink, China's top water quality official said yesterday in response to recent questions on urban tap water quality.

Shao Yisheng, director of the Urban Water Quality Monitoring Center under the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, said China's urban water supply is generally safe, citing figures from the results of quality inspections conducted in 2011, Xinhua News Agency reported.

The center has tested tap water samples from water plants that provided 80 percent of the Chinese urban public water supply and found that 83 percent of the tap water provided by these plants is qualified under a newly-revised standard for drinking water quality, said Shao.

The new standard, which is generally close to that of developed countries, was revised and issued by the Ministry of Health in 2006 and is set to take effect from July this year.

Concerns over drinking water safety were raised after the Beijing-based Century Weekly magazine reported this week that the water quality of at least 1,000 tap water providers in cities did not meet relevant standards, citing the results of a MHURD drinking water survey in 2009 that covered more than 4,000 water plants.

Shanghai's water authority responded on Wednesday that water quality passing rate reached 96 percent in the city since Shanghai switched its major water resource to the Qingcaosha Reservoir that takes water from the center of the Yangtze River last year.