Red China's green revolution

June 17, 2007 Red China's green revolution Fed up with algae-infested lakes, smog-filled cities, and rivers coloured black, red and green by chemical discharge, ordinary Chinese are fighting back in a growing tide of 'green dissent' By Chua Chin Hon, IN WUXI AND XIAMEN, EASTERN CHINA SOME time on or around May 25, a mysterious mobile phone text message began circulating in Xiamen, a scenic port city in eastern China. The SMS warned, in emotive language, that a new petrochemical plant being built in the Haichang district, located just 16km from the city centre, would produce pollutants that would lead to higher rates of leukaemia and foetal abnormalities. 'It will be like releasing an atomic bomb on Xiamen,' the message said. It concluded by urging residents to wear yellow ribbons and join a '10,000-men march' on June 1 to the local government's office. The clarion call was unusual in China, given the government's well-known intolerance for such activities. Within hours, the message made its way to the Internet where it was circulated even more widely via e-mail, instant messaging groups and online forums. No one could be sure if the whole affair was just a prank. But the message nonetheless succeeded in stoking unprecedented public opposition to the petrochemical plant, which would produce 800,000 tonnes of paraxylene (PX) annually when construction is completed by the end of next year. Xiamen residents and environmental activists told The Sunday Times that opposition from a small group of academics, property developers and residents in the Haichang district had been festering for years even though the Taiwan-funded Tenglong Aromatic PX (Xiamen) Company won final approval to build the plant only in June last year. The company claimed that PX, a petrochemical that goes into polyester and fabrics, was no more dangerous than petrol. But critics, as well as Chinese state media, described it as highly polluting and potentially cancer-causing. Green people power BY MAY 29, four days after the message first appeared, the panicking Xiamen government realised that many residents were serious about the protest march. In a last-ditch effort to stave off the protest, Xiamen's vice-mayor Ding Guoyan held a press conference on May 30 to announce the suspension of the PX project. His comment failed to stop the gathering storm of 'green dissent'. By lunchtime on June 1, China's first public display of 'green' People Power was well and truly on its way as thousands of Xiamen residents marched to the government's office demanding that the PX project be scrapped. They waved banners and placards proclaiming 'Resist PX, Save Xiamen', and 'We don't want GDP, we want to protect our children'. A second but smaller protest was also staged the next day. In all, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 residents took to the streets over two days to signal their unhappiness with a government decision that they feared would ruin their health in the long run. 'For thousands of years in China, we've seen people protest for all sorts of reasons, be it politics, personal gain, or for the lack of a job,' said Ms Azure Ma, one of the few Xiamen-based environmentalists willing to speak on record about the recent rallies. 'This is the first time people here are taking to the streets of a Chinese city in the name of environmental protection. This is a major milestone for environmental awareness in China.' It is often said that the modern Chinese economy is built on the sacrifices of its 750 million peasants, many of whom were forced off their farmland and ancestral homes to make way for factories, industrial parks and highways. Though they were the earliest group of people to make sacrifices for the country's painful transition to a market economy, Chinese peasants are still among the last to enjoy the fruits of economic progress. If anything else, many of them end up being the first to encounter the environmental fallout from years of runaway economic growth. Cancer villages THE roots of China's 'green dissent' can thus be traced to little-known villages such as Huaxi and Yangqiao along the prosperous south-eastern coast, where a huge number of polluting chemical plants started springing up in the 1980s. Reports about how some rural communities were turning into 'cancer villages' began emerging in the media in the late 1990s when peasants alleged that polluting fumes and effluent from chemical plants had caused a spike in cancer victims in their ranks. When years of appeals to close the polluting factories failed, some villagers took matters into their own hands, often with violent consequences. In April 2005, thousands rioted in the village of Huaxi in eastern Zhejiang province when police tried to break up protesters who had set up makeshift barriers outside several chemical plants. Chinese cities have not been immune from the country's environmental woes. A growing number of cities suffer from acid rain and air pollution caused by surging car ownership and round- the-clock construction. A government survey of the air quality in 595 Chinese cities found that nearly two in three suffered from air pollution last year. Only 37.6 per cent of the cities surveyed had air quality considered 'clean and healthy', down 7.3 percentage points from 2005. Chinese urbanites, however, have largely been unmoved by environmental concerns - until now. Across various Chinese cities this past month, ordinary urban dwellers fed-up with pollution and incompetent city planning scored significant back-to-back victories against their local government and businesses - a trend suggesting that the 'green dissent' has entered a new phase. In Beijing, for instance, protesting residents in the western Haidian district succeeded in getting the country's top environmental watchdog - the State Environmental Protection Administration (Sepa) - to suspend plans for building a new rubbish incinerator near their homes. On May 26, the official Xinhua news agency announced that China was shelving plans to build a high-speed magnetic levitation train route linking the eastern cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou, following months of protests by residents worried about potential radiation along the route. Even Sepa has not been immune from the 'green dissenters' in this summer of discontent. Last Thursday, more than 80 fish farmers from coastal Zhejiang province sued Sepa and its Wenzhou branch for failing to monitor pollution which resulted in 170 million yuan (S$34.4 million) worth of financial losses for them. Two days before that, the wife of a detained green activist also tried to sue the environmental watchdog for awarding a polluting city in eastern China an environment award. The colour of money IT IS tempting to attribute this wave of 'green dissent' to greater environmental awareness in China. But interviews with Xiamen residents and media accounts of the other cases suggest that a more primal motivation - property prices - is at work as well. This was apparent when Xiamen businesswoman Chen Li took The Sunday Times on a tour of the neighbourhood where the PX petrochemical plant was going to be built. During the 30-minute drive, she expressed concern that the PX plant was being built too close to existing villages, schools and new housing being constructed for displaced peasants. However, her final stop was the gorgeous Future Coast Apartments where she had bought a 890,000 yuan unit two years ago. The top-end property project is within a 5km drive of the proposed PX plant and two other chemical factories which are already in operation. Green is the colour of money, too Prices for the apartments at Future Coast have stagnated since her purchase in 2005, given the negative publicity about the chemical plants. Now, she is unsure if she can find buyers for her apartment, said Ms Chen. 'You should go talk to the other home owners inside Future Coast; they will have a lot to say about the PX plant,' the businesswoman said before zipping off to meet her family for dinner in town. A Xiamen environmental activist who requested anonymity said the apparent 'idealism' of the protesters masked many complex undercurrents to the story, one of which is the vicious zero sum game between the city's property developers and the owners of the chemical plants. 'In a small district like Haichang, you clearly can't have both a cluster of chemical plants and luxurious sea-front property projects,' he told The Sunday Times. 'The government made a mess of the urban planning and obviously no one wants to be the one footing the bill for that mistake.' The police in Xiamen are now apparently looking into a tip-off that some of the anti-PX protesters were actually hired by the property developers for 100 yuan a day, the activist added. Not everyone has a problem with such an approach though. Mr Huang Yilei, a resident in Future Coast, said: 'Green is the colour of the environmental movement. 'But it is also the colour of money.' Avoidable crisis FOR Xiamen residents contemplating whether to join the protest march or not, one question they asked themselves was whether it would make any difference. No one knew for sure, though they did not have to go far to discover the price of apathy and inaction in today's rapidly urbanising China. Wuxi, a city 90 minutes away by plane up north along the coast, was battling its worst-ever environmental disaster after ignoring years of warning about the polluted state of its main water source, Lake Tai. The lake, China's third largest, was hit with a massive bloom of blue-green algae on May 28 following days of high temperature, low water levels, and decades of indiscriminate dumping of untreated sewage, industrial pollutants and agricultural waste into it. Large tracts of the lake were turned luminous green by the algae bloom, which also overwhelmed the city's water processing plants and turned the tap water putrid. Fresh water supply for nearly half the city's population of five million had to be cut off for days. Panic buying of bottled water broke out in supermarkets while factories in the manufacturing boom town had to stop work or scramble for alternative water supplies. Tourists also cancelled their trips to Wuxi in large numbers, dealing a severe blow to the hotels and restaurants in the eastern Chinese city famous for its scenic lake views. There was a palpable sense of anger among Wuxi residents who spoke to The Sunday Times. Many of them said the writing had been on the wall for decades, and faulted the government for not cleaning up the lake properly despite spending millions of dollars on the effort. 'The Lake Tai disaster is entirely avoidable,' said Shanghai-based water treatment expert Professor Liu Guangzhao in an interview. 'Since 2002, I've warned that the algae in the lake could see an explosive growth. But each time, the warning only gets passed down to increasingly lower-ranking bureaucrats, resulting in today's crisis.' Alarm bells ringing IN A directive issued last week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called for a thorough investigation of the Lake Tai pollution, saying that the incident had 'sounded the alarm for us'. However, the government's own studies suggested that the 'alarm' had been ringing for years as the red-hot economy pushed the country's environment, not just Lake Tai, to the limit. Sepa's figures showed that nearly two in three Chinese face the brunt of air pollution, while more than 70 per cent of the country's waterways and lakes were polluted. The 'alarm' merely got louder this summer as ordinary Chinese pushed back. It is unclear how this surge in 'green dissent' will eventually play out in China, said Ms Ma, who has been running the non-governmental Xiamen Greencross Association since 2000. But it is obvious, she added, that ordinary Chinese, the government, big businesses, as well as the country's nascent environmental movement, have some tough questions to ask themselves in the days ahead. Ms Ma said: 'For the government, its competence and decisions are now being questioned by a population that has more channels of communication than ever. 'For the ordinary citizen, recent events show that they need to come forward to solve their own problems. For environmental NGOs like us, we need to think about where we stand in all this and what kind of useful role we can play.' How these different groups respond to one another will have widespread implications beyond the mere control of pollution. Billions of dollars could hang in the balance if this rising tide of 'green dissent' is mismanaged. Just ask the Xiamen government and Tenglong Aromatic PX, the Taiwan-funded company behind the ambitious plans to build the 10.8 billion yuan PX plant. Following the outburst of public opposition, the 115ha plot of land devoted to the plant now lies abandoned, occupied by grazing cows from nearby villages. Talk is rife that the company might build the petrochemical plant elsewhere - a decision that would cost the government a massive 80 billion yuan in lost economic activity every year, or equivalent to about 70 per cent of its current GDP. The 35 billion yuan project to build a mag-lev train route between Shanghai and Hangzhou is another expensive casualty of China's 'green dissent'. The project is now in limbo after petitioning residents forced the local government to suspend it. Xiamen University student Chen Guiyuan said: 'Maybe Chinese officials will finally take the environment seriously now that they realise how expensive their miscalculation can be.'