Tempers Flare in China

Courage comes to those with nothing to lose. The severe environmental pollution suffered by the residents of the village of Huaxi, in the city of Dongyang in China's Zhejiang province, led them to combat riot police this April. Dozens of officials' cars were overturned, several peasants were beaten during the melee, and a few were arrested afterward. But the villagers remain defiant.

"We're fighting for our lives, you know, our lives," one shop owner insists when recalling the events. She and her neighbors explain that before the protests, they had become seriously worried about their children's health and could no longer grow rice and vegetables in the nearby plots.

Their action was largely successful. The chemical plants that were in the neighboring industrial park have been ordered to move elsewhere. The park itself is now eerily quiet, except for some security guards sitting at the gates of mostly dismantled plants. Residents say the city of Dongyang is paying for the plants to move, but details are sketchy. At least one company is stalling the relocation.

Peasant protests are a growing phenomenon in China. Li Lianjiang, an associate professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, is an authority on Chinese peasant protests. He says that whereas a few years ago, excessive and arbitrary taxation was the peasants' main complaint, illegal land seizures and pollution are becoming the main sources of contention. There were 74,000 protests in China last year, according to official statistics. By comparison, Li says, in 1993 there were 10,000 occurrences of such "public incidents," as authorities prefer to call them.

The central government appears conflicted in its response to these protests. From one perspective, environmental protection is a national priority, and the protests help to focus attention on some of the most serious cases of environmental abuse. But protests are a step toward political instability, something that authorities seek to avoid above all else. Beijing's response is therefore both to suppress the protesters and to attempt to address their complaints.

The rise in protests so far poses little threat to the expansion of foreign chemical makers into China. For the most part, foreign companies are putting up plants in well-planned industrial parks where wastewater is treated and air emissions are measured. The increase in protests could even be considered good news for foreign firms if their Chinese competitors are forced to invest in expensive environmental abatement equipment as a result of increased government controls.

The responsible practices of foreign companies at times appear too advanced for China. Earlier this year, a large multinational company was told by local government officials that it would be unwise to explain to people living next to its new plant what the facility makes and how it does it. Executives eager to be responsible neighbors were told that doing so would merely make local residents suspicious.

For now, companies in China still enjoy considerable leeway if they wish to pollute. In her 2004 book on the Chinese environment, "The River Runs Black," Elizabeth C. Economy notes that Chinese national environmental laws are vague and open to interpretation by local officials. Citizens who wish to sue polluters thus face considerable difficulty in showing that they have a case.

An additional problem is the decentralization of Chinese environmental watchdogs. China's top environmental authority, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), lacks power. And it's not clear that SEPA will be able to increase its influence in the near future.

SEPA has little authority over the thousands--11,000 in all, according to Economy--of environmental protection bureaus at the provincial, municipal, township, and village levels in China. While these agencies theoretically uphold national standards, they tend to operate in ways that best suit the local government they are attached to. They are aided by the vagueness of national regulations.

Mao Da, an environmental activist with the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Global Village of Beijing, tells C&EN that SEPA is studying ways to harness these regional agencies into a single structure under Beijing's direct control. A precedent for such reorganization was set in 1998 when China centralized its customs administration in a successful effort to clamp down on smuggling that had spun completely out of control. Chinese customs bureaus had been operating quite independently from the central government. SEPA did not respond to C&EN's requests for interviews.

There is a lack of political will to strengthen SEPA that is alarming given the severity of the environmental disasters that China has already suffered. Until the 1970s, environmental protection agencies lacked regulatory clout even in developed countries. In the U.S., one event that led to the strengthening of the powers of federal-level environmental protection was the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River. Japan strengthened its environmental controls after thousands of villagers living near Minamata Bay were poisoned by the mercury waste of a nearby chemical plant in the 1950s and 1960s.

Huo Daishan, an environmental and social activist in China's central province of Henan, believes that the pollution of the Huai River water system is making more people seriously sick than in Minamata. But he has yet to see effective official action to control the pollution. Authorities were forced to admit earlier this year that a 10-year program launched by the central government to clean up the Huai River water system has been an utter failure, mostly because of local governments' failure to cooperate.

The embarrassment is particularly grave, Huo says, given that China's highest decision-making body, the State Council, had sponsored the cleanup effort. Huo maintains that the $2.5 billion or so that the central government spent on cleaning up the Huai might as well have been thrown in the river. Pollution is worse than ever, he says.

Tang Xiyang, famous in China as one of the country's first environmentalists, says there may be several other ongoing environmental disasters. "But the media won't report it," he says. "And if the people don't know, there is no reason to fix the problem." Ultimately, Tang says, China's environmental problems are the result of the public's general lack of environmental consciousness. "In the West, you believe that we all belong to the natural environment, but Chinese believe that the environment belongs to them," he says.

Hong Kong Baptist University's Li says environmental protection has a lower priority than economic growth in the minds of government decisionmakers in China. This is one of the reasons that government officials throughout China don't consider environmental protection a top priority.

Another hindrance, he says, is that China is traditionally not a top-down society. It prefers to operate by consensus, with input from the lower levels. In this process, "Chinese people may have a strong incentive to participate, but they do not have a channel," he says. And officials at the local level, perhaps owing to corruption, fail to adequately report local conditions to the national government.

Moreover, Li points out, with the exception of SEPA, China's environmental protection agencies are revenue generating. In most cases, companies can get away with polluting rivers and the air by paying a fee to the local environmental bureaus. "When the local governments require some new funds, they can go on inspection tours of local companies," he says. "And when they come back, they have their coffers filled." Economy, the book author, says companies whose emissions have generated complaints are merely charged higher fees.

In more advanced countries, citizens who are dissatisfied with their area's deteriorating environmental conditions can alert the media or involve NGOs. Chinese authorities can selectively suppress reports on some particularly alarming situations while freely allowing journalists' depictions of others. This summer, the Communist Party ordered all media in China to check their facts with "related administrative departments" before publishing reports on food safety. The order followed local media reports, later proven exaggerated, that Chinese beer was unsafe.

NGOS HAVE been emerging in China over the past decade, but they lack the weight that a confrontational group such as Greenpeace carries. The government permits such NGOs, as long as they stick closely to their stated goals. "Greenpeace would not be tolerated in China," Li says. "It's a political organization." Chinese NGOs confine themselves to activities such as educating the public on the importance of environmental protection, or specific projects such as saving Tibetan antelopes.

Despite this dearth of means to press for redress, protesting needn't be the approach of last resort for Chinese peasants to express their discontent, Hong Kong Baptist University's Li notes. He says laws in China are gradually becoming more specific, and that farmers who cannot afford lawyers are buying legal textbooks that they use to avail themselves of their rights. "If there is a law, and peasants can indubitably establish a case that local authorities have violated this law; this puts the people in a stronger position," he says.

Huo, the Henan-based activist, is against confrontational protests. He argues that they are self-defeating when those harmed by pollution already have the law on their side. He advocates meetings with the officials in charge, the delivery of hard facts, and quiet persistence. He says his approach has earned him the respect of Pan Yue, a vice minister of SEPA who is reputed to be the real leader of the agency.

Occasionally, peasants are able to attract the sympathy of idealistic lawyers such as Beijing's Zhang Jingjing, who has taken on the case of the Huaxi villagers. Speaking to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post this summer, Zhang said that taking peasants' cases to court can prevent conflicts from turning violent. In this case, she took on the case after it had erupted in violence.

The case of the Huaxi peasants provides a scary glimpse into the incompetence of local authorities.

Villagers there tell C&EN that the industrial park was set up by the surrounding city of Dongyang four years ago in an effort to increase economic activity. Woodworking, Dongyang's traditional industry, had been declining in recent years. Huaxi, on the city's outskirts, is itself far from being an idyllic farming community. There is farmland, but the main industry is the unsightly process of sorting used plastic for recycling.

To set up the industrial park, the government seized several villagers' farming plots in exchange for what the villagers say was insufficient compensation. When plants at the park later started operating, they were a source of severe air pollution, particularly during the night.

In the mornings, one mother tells C&EN, a thick fog would envelope her neighborhood less than a mile from the industrial park, causing eyes to water and burn. Another villager, who grows most of her vegetables and all her family's rice nearby, says her produce would spoil before harvest. A river running through the industrial park was also contaminated, they say.

POLLUTED RIVER

Villagers Along The Huai River System Suffer

For environmental and social activist Huo Daishan, there is no doubt. The severe pollution of the Shaying River, a tributary of the Huai River in the central Chinese province of Henan, is the cause of hundreds of cancer cases in villages along its banks. According to Huo, 118 people have died of cancer in Huang Meng Ying, a village of 2,600, since 1990. Those living closest to the water were the first to go.

Huo is trying to bring to the area, 200 miles south of the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, anyone who might help fix the problem, from a university professor in Japan to the central government in Beijing. The area's plight made the front page of the New York Times last fall, and Chinese television has broadcast nationally on the issue on several occasions.

The attention has so far not translated into much concrete action. Huo is encouraged that officials from the Ministry of Health will soon test the area's water. But meanwhile, sick villagers face a severe financial crunch in paying for medical treatment. Several have had surgery to remove tumors in various parts of their bodies.

Huo says he left his job as a reporter for a local newspaper in 1998 after being stopped from publishing photos of thousands of dead fish on the banks of the Huai River. Since then, except for two years when he moved away to shield his family from the area's growing pollution, Huo says he has devoted his life to reducing pollution in the Huai River system and helping those affected by it.

He has formed a group, the Huai River Protectors, to bring attention to the region's environmental woes. For money, he and his two sons run a small Internet café and sell photos of river pollution to visiting journalists. They live in Shenqiu, a town on the Huai about a half-hour drive from Huang Meng Ying. Unlike their neighbors, the Huos filter their water with a reverse-osmosis system.

Few people know the Huai River as well as Huo. He walks frequently along its banks, taking photos and recording the times and dates when pollution is worst. He says industry stops polluting the river when senior officials visit from Beijing. He recalls that the water suddenly became cleaner in July 2002 just ahead of a visit by Xie Zhenhua, who was then the head of the State Environmental Protection Agency. The river turned black the night Xie left, Huo says.

The pollution of the Huai seems to be on a scale unlike anywhere else. At times, according to Huo, the river is pitch-black for hundreds of kilometers. In Shenqiu, the Huai's water is at times covered by a thick purplish foam, he says. In 2000, Huo and others say, six residents of the city of Fuyang in Anhui province died after walking by the city's main sewage outlet, which flows into the Huai.

In recent years, Huo has been paying most attention to what he calls the "cancer village," Huang Meng Ying. He tries to bring medical relief to the villagers while anticipating that the problem will spread. "The water is black, the food is poisoned--how could more people not get sick?" he asks.

According to Huo, the main culprit for the pollution is the Lianhua Group, China's largest producer of monosodium glutamate, which employs several thousand workers in the upstream city of Xiangcheng. The group was fined about $1.2 million in 2003 for illegal emissions, despite being majority owned by the government of Xiangcheng.

If the pollution were not enough, Lianhua is scorned by the Chinese financial community. In November 2003, Xinhua Far East China Ratings downgraded the long-term debt of Lianhua, claiming that its "internal governance and internal control deviate significantly from the average market norm." Xinhua was basing its opinion on a report prepared by a team of government auditors.

One of Lianhua's monosodium glutamate plants is a joint venture owned 51% by the Japanese firm Ajinomoto. In faxed answers to questions from C&EN, Ajinomoto declined to explain why it chose Lianhua as its partner back in the early 1990s.

But Ajinomoto hardly stands by the Chinese firm. It insists that all cases of pollution are its partner's doing and points out that the capacity of the joint venture is smaller than that of Lianhua's wholly owned plants at the site.

Ajinomoto further claims that the Lianhua-Ajinomoto venture operates under the strict environmental controls of the local and central governments and is subject to internal audits conducted by Ajinomoto's Shanghai office. Ajinomoto adds that effluent from its plant is treated by its own facilities before release.

Yet the Henan joint venture is the only one of Ajinomoto's 95 subsidiaries worldwide to be excluded from the company's 2004 corporate and social responsibility report. And, unlike other Ajinomoto subsidiaries, the venture in Henan is not the object of independent audits.

Back in Shenqiu, Huo is dismayed that Ajinomoto could claim that its effluent is separate from Lianhua's. His on-site observations indicate that the Ajinomoto venture is integrated into Lianhua's operations.

Despite rising pollution and fatalities, Huo is an optimist who believes that progress is being made. He notes that he recently met with Lianhua managers. Nothing was achieved, he concedes, but the meeting itself was good news. He is also encouraged by the testing near his home of a low-cost water purification system designed by a Japanese researcher. Huo hopes it will soon be ready for installation in the affected villages.

Huo adds that Chinese society is becoming more open, and that the government is paying more attention to people's opinions. It's democratizing, but not far enough yet. "At the core, it's a problem of profit," he says. "The profit that the factory can earn versus the economic advantage that the villagers derive from the land they live on and fish and water provided by the river."

TO THIS DAY, the villagers do not know what the plants in the park were producing, except that they were Chinese-owned "chemical" plants. From the outside, what remains of the plants suggests they were used for producing small batches or for product formulation.

There is no sign that the unfenced industrial park was equipped with central wastewater treatment facilities, nor is the presence of such equipment evident at the individual plants, of which there were reportedly 13.

The villagers first protested two years ago in a demonstration that ended in violence, they say. This year's protest began when villagers blocked the access road to the industrial park for several days. When several hundred police officers from neighboring cities came to assist the local police in clearing the road, a fierce battle ensued.

According to villagers, several arrests were made, but only of "a few" people who engaged in violence. The South China Morning Post has since reported that nine villagers will likely be in jail for three to 10 years after being tried in Dongyang. They claim to have been tortured. An unbowed older villager, who was beaten during the fracas but not arrested, tells C&EN that violence will erupt again if all the plants in the park fail to move away.

The Dongyang protest attracted much attention and was likely the inspiration for a similar protest in the Zhejiang city of Xinchang, less than two hours away by car from Dongyang. Thousands of Xinchang villagers battled authorities in July over a pharmaceutical ingredient plant that they wanted shut for causing water pollution and having an explosion.

When peasants protest, they are careful not to appear to be challenging the authority of the central government, which they perceive as rather benevolent, Li says. And despite their aversion to social turmoil, some senior officials in the central government welcome the protests as useful.

Chen Xiwen, a top central government official involved in economic and financial affairs, declared in July that the bloody rural riots reflect farmers' willingness to speak up on injustices and are a sign of China's democratization. He added that the protests helped the central government act quickly in fixing the problems faced by local farmers.

Chen's comments were generally greeted with dismay outside China as they seem to encourage residents of the Chinese countryside to riot over pollution even more frequently than they are doing already. But the farmers, who believe they are fighting for survival, hardly needed the encouragement of a senior official. Rural instability will continue until authorities methodically address the peasants' sources of discontent.