China's Pollution Revolution

[marmar]

from Washington Monthly, via AlterNet:



China's Pollution Revolution

By Christina Larson, Washington Monthly. Posted January 8, 2008.

Contaminated rivers and farms are triggering peasant protests. Will it be enough to force real change?




In 2005, China was shaken by 51,000 pollution-triggered "public disturbances" -- demonstrations or riots of a hundred or more people protesting the contamination of rivers and farms -- according to the government's own statistics. (The real figures are almost certainly higher.) The Ministry of Public Security has ranked pollution among the top five threats to China's peace and stability.

One hotbed of such environmental unrest is Hunan Province, a former stronghold of Sun Yat-Sen's anti-imperial forces and the birthplace of Mao Zedong. This southern province has twice nurtured agitated peasant movements that have risen against the central government.

In October, I met the unlikely instigator of a pollution riot: an unassuming forty-seven-year-old farmer named Chen Li Fang. With her husband, Chen grows rice and raises pigs, chickens, and ducks in the village of Shutangshan, in northeastern Hunan. In 2001, a chemical processing plant opened less than a mile from their farm. The owner of the factory had first considered setting up shop in a neighboring town, but the local government badly wanted to attract both the jobs and tax revenue. According to China Economic Times, it offered the owner of the Hunan Jingtian Science and Technology Company generous financial incentives to open its plant there.

By 2003, Chen and other villagers had compiled a troubling list of problems that had materialized since the factory opened. Dozens of people reported stomach pains, migraine headaches, and vomiting. Local media reported ten new cases of cancer among people who lived within a mile and a half of the factory -- an alarming number for a village of only a few hundred people.

Farmers watched their cattle die and rice yields decline. Chen and other villagers believed that wastewater discharged from the factory had poisoned the Xiang River, a source for drinking water and irrigation, and that the dark smoke rising from the plant's chimney had fouled the air. (The factory owner insisted to the local press that while his plant had pollution problems, the villagers' ailments could not be traced conclusively to its emissions.) ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/72995/

[sam sarrha]

1. their screwed and us along with them... i heard 35% of LA's air pollution is from china, satellite

photos show massive clouds of pollution drifting off china toward us..

[tom_paine]

2. The Chinese Peasants should have the same result poor Amerikan peasants have

when trying to challenge the Bushies.

Rolled over with a metaphorical steamroller...a literal one if they dare to take any real action.

What's "Don't taze me, bro?" in Chinese.