There’s a popular saying on China’s microblogs that “if you were born in China, you just chose to play in hard mode”. As an expatriate in this country, you have to try your best to keep up with the locals to train yourself to be a “Super Mario”: mind your food, mind the air you breathe and mind your drink.

The scandalous frequency of food safety scandals has made nearly nothing in China eatable. Air pollution has developed into a severe headache for Chinese’s metropolises, such as Beijing and Shanghai, which are engulfed in smog most days of the year. And water is never a fresh topic.

Even so, it is still terrifying to know that half of the country’s tap water supply is unqualified knockoff oakleys, and even tainted with heavy metals.

The cover story of the latest issue of Caixin Magazine took a look into the state of China’s tap water, starting from the government’s largest survey in a decade of 4,000 urban water supply plants 3 years ago. However, the results might be too close to the dirty truth to be released to the public.

“Without authority, I cannot tell you the figure [actual qualification rate of drinking water],” Song Lanhe [chief scientist of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development's water quality monitor center] told Caixin reporters.

Sources close to the ministry said the actual number of problematic treatment plants exposed by the survey could be as high as 50 percent. Song did not rule out, or confirm, the estimate.

China plans to adopt stricter quality standards for drinking water in July, but treatment facilities nationwide are hard-pressed to meet existing criteria. Experts say half of the country's water supply plants cannot meet current standards.

The new regulations will mostly serve as guidance and are hard to mandatorily implement, Song said. Local governments will continue to claim that water quality met standards when it did not, Song said.

The news that only half of the tap water supplied is qualified was reposted more than four million times on Chinese mircoblogs Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo overnight.

A local newspaper in the eastern tourist city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province even implied in a report on Tuesday that Caixin’s story might have pushed up share prices in the water sector.

Analysts said some fund managers have sensed the investment potential in the related listed companies’ business opportunities, such as technology development in production sewage treatment equipment and drinking water equipment.

In our previous post, Future business opportunities in helping China get clean water replica oakley sunglasses, renowned China expert Jack Perkowski discussed how water pollution and a clean water shortage could bring new business opportunities for those who want to dig future gold in the world’s second-richest and most populous country.