China's Pollution Revolution

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

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.)

Groups of villagers visited the factory repeatedly to talk to the management, requesting that the emissions-control equipment be upgraded or the most polluting production lines be discontinued. The owner offered small payments to those who complained loudest -- enough to temporarily placate poor farmers, if not enough to cover their losses. Gradually, even those who were initially satisfied with their compensation demanded that the factory close. They also petitioned the environmental protection bureaus of Wangcheng County, where the factory is located, and nearby Changsha City, but officials approved the factory to continue operations.

Having exhausted peaceful channels, the villagers turned to force. Twice in the summer of 2004, more than a hundred residents marched onto factory grounds to disconnect its electricity. Chen Li Fang organized the second effort. She split the villagers into two groups, with the first storming the front gates, the second approaching from behind. The manager cowered in his office and called the police. Someone ripped the power-supply unit off the wall. The factory was shut down for three days before the equipment could be replaced. Chen served a short jail term.

But Chen was undeterred, feeling that she had less and less to lose. In January 2006, she traveled to Beijing for the first time. She camped for two weeks in a train station's waiting room as she struggled to get an audience with the national environmental ministry. Finally, she met with an official from the State Environmental Protection Administration, China's understaffed and overstretched version of the EPA, and was sent home with a letter directing the provincial government to examine her case. Nothing much changed.

In November she returned to Beijing, but this time she met with an organization of public-interest lawyers, the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. Founded in 1998, the center is staffed by volunteers -- mostly law professors and young law students -- and operates a free legal advice hotline. Since it launched, it has fielded about 10,000 calls. Lawyers from the center have personally taken up more than eighty callers' cases; they've won a third of those cases, lost a third, and a third are still pending.

China has had environmental laws on the books for thirty years, but teaching citizens to use them is a relatively new enterprise. So, too, is the expectation that laws should be enforced. Local environmental officials have surprisingly limited authority to implement Beijing's green regulations, as these cadres receive both their orders and their salaries from local government, which has an economic interest in shielding local industry.

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Christina Larson is an editor of the Washington Monthly. She traveled to China in the spring and fall of 2007, visiting Beijing, Shenyang, Lanzhou, Chengdu, Kunming, Changsha City, and villages in Gansu, Sichuan, and Hunan provinces.

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