HONG KONG (Reuters):

China faces an environmental crisis that threatens to wipe out much of the gains of three decades of economic growth, one of China's most outspoken environment officials said in comments published yesterday.

"China is dangerously near a crisis. The country's enormous environmental debt will have to be paid one way or another," Pan Yue, deputy head of China's State Environmental Protection Administration, said in a letter to the South China Morning Post.

"(We must) begin paying this debt now ... rather than allowing it to accumulate and, ultimately, threaten to bankrupt us all," he added.

Beijing has admitted to some of the environmental degradation caused by three decades of pursuing rapid economic growth at almost any cost, but the picture it painted was still incomplete and China needed action, not rhetoric, Pan said.

Realistic estimates put environ-mental damage at eight to 13 per cent of China's national income each year, meaning the cost of pollution off-set almost all of China's economic gains since the late 1970s, he said. The costs of pollution are being borne by ordinary Chinese.

"Scarcely anyone bothers to consider the environmental costs to - or rights of - the country's poor and powerless," Pan said.

A quarter of the population drinks substandard water, a third of urbanites breathe badly-polluted air and China has a major water pollution incident every two days on average, he added.

Pan urged the government to introduce legal mechanisms to make polluters pay and reward those who protect the environment.

He also called on Beijing to help unify the environmental watchdogs scattered across different sectors, and establish a system to monitor officials' performance in environmental as well as economic fields.