Wu Lihong

His address book contained cellphone numbers for officials in Beijing and the provincial capital of Nanjing who outranked the party bosses where he lived.

When party officials offered him a chance to profit handsomely from a pollution cleanup contract, a friend warned him not to accept.

The country’s third largest freshwater body, Lake Tai, or Taihu in Chinese, has long provided the people of the lower Yangtze River Delta with both their wealth and their conception of natural beauty.

Along the lake’s northern reaches, near the city of Wuxi, placid waters and misty hills captured the imagination of Chinese for hundreds of years.

The wealthy built gardens that featured the lake’s wrinkled, water-scarred limestone rocks set in groves of bamboo and chrysanthemum."

Despite Chinese authorities' increasing awareness of environmental problems, Wu Lihong was arrested and tried for alleged extortion of one of the polluters (see Economist article).