Chinese protesters take to the streets in Kunming over chemical plant plans
Hundreds of campaigners marched through the streets of a city in southwest China on Thursday in the latest environmental protest to hit the country.
Demonstrators hold a banner as they march on a street during a protest against a planned refinery believed to produce the chemical paraxylene (PX), near the Yunnan provincial government in Kunming, Yunnan province Photo: REUTERS
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai 4:49AM BST 17 May 2013
One eye witnesses said that at least 1,000 residents of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, took to the streets to protest against the construction of a petrochemical plant they fear could bring further pollution to the rapidly developing region.
The refinery and so-called "PX plant", which are planned by the Chinese oil and gas giant CNPC, would produce around 500,000 tons of paraxylene, a carcinogenic petrochemical, each year, according to state media.
Online photographs showed protesters wearing masks and holding banners reading: "Get out, refinery!"
One image pictured a man brandishing a sign in English that read: "Democracy! It is begining! [sic]" The scale of Thursday's protest forced Kumning's mayor, Li Wenrong, to take the highly unusual step of addressing the crowds.
He became "visibly angry" and told protesters they should not have gathered in public, according to the South China Morning Post. Mr Li said he could not promise a vote on the plant's construction since there was no "precedent in China for the practice of one-person-one-vote", the newspaper reported.
One witness, who declined to be named, told The Daily Telegraph the rally had started at around 10am outside the regional government headquarters and had escalated after a "man in his 20s" was arrested after addressing the crowds.
"The police went in and grabbed this guy and pulled him through the crowd into a paddy-wagon," the witness said. "That launched the protest. Banners came out. Slogans came out and in [the space of] five minutes you had 600 people shutting down the street that leads to the provincial government [building]."
Several protesters were dragged away by security forces, according to the South China Morning Post, and online photographs showed hundreds of black-clad police monitoring the event. But the march, which continued into Thursday afternoon, appeared to pass off without violent confrontations.
"After the arrest happened they were very hands off," said the witness, who said authorities had employed a number of "scare tactics" in the days leading up to the protest, hoping to stifle any public show of dissent.
Internet censors took a harder-line, blocking searches for "Kunming PX" on Chinese social media sites. The Southern Metropolis newspaper reported that local universities had urged their students not to join the protesters.
The protest was the second to take place in Kunming this month and the latest in a string of NIMBY protests nationwide. In 2011, authorities cancelled the construction of a PX plant in the northeastern city of Dalian after major protests there. On Wednesday, state media reported that plans to build a battery factory on the outskirts of Shanghai had been scrapped following protests.
Meanwhile, authorities in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, appear nervous that large-scale environmental rallies could spread there because of public anger over a PX plant in Pengzhou, on the city's outskirts.
Last week, dozens of police officers could be seen patrolling the city's *People's Square under the gaze of a giant statue of Chairman Mao. ** * "Until residents feel they can exercise their right to oversee and participate in transparent local decision-making processes, this sort of social discontent will only increase," said Sam Geall, the editor of 'China and the Environment: the Green Revolution', a new book on Chinese environmentalism.
"China has laws and regulations that require environmental impact assessments and the consultation of local communities before developments take place, but in practice implementation is frequently thwarted by collusion between local officials and polluters," added Geall, an environmental expert from the University of Oxford.
"Middle-class urbanites have gained economically in recent years, but this has not been matched with a clear stake in local decision-making processes, which means that residents' sense of security is undermined with regard to the future of their homes, their cities, and of theirs and their children's health."
