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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.'
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