XINCHANG,
China After three nights of increasingly heavy rioting,
the police were taking no chances, deploying dozens of busloads
of officers and blocking every road leading to the factory.
The police began deploying in large numbers before dusk Monday,
but the angry villagers had already made their moves. They had
learned their lessons after studying reports of riots that had
swept rural China in recent months. Sneaking over mountain paths
and wading through rice paddies, they made their way to a
pharmaceuticals plant, they said, for a showdown over the
environmental threat they say it poses.
As many as 15,000 people massed here on Sunday night and fought
with the authorities, overturning police cars and throwing
stones, undeterred by thick clouds of tear gas.
Fewer people turned out on Monday evening under rainy skies, but
residents of this factory town in China's wealthy Zhejiang
Province vow they will keep demonstrating until they have forced
the 10-year-old plant to relocate.
"This is the only way to solve problems like ours,"
said one protester, 22, whose house sits near the smashed gates
of the factory, where the police were massed. "If you go to
see the mayor or some city official, they just take your money
and do nothing."
The riots in Xinchang are part of a rising tide of discontent in
China, with the number of mass protests like these reaching
74,000 last year from about 10,000 a decade earlier, according
to government figures. The details have varied from incident to
incident, but the recent wave of protests shares a foundation of
accumulated anger over the failure of China's political system
to respond to legitimate grievances and defiance of the local
authorities, who are often seen as corrupt.
A sign of the leadership's concern over the turbulence can be
seen in a proliferation of high-level statements.
In a nationally televised news conference this month, Li
Jingtian, deputy director of the Communist Party's organization
bureau, complained that "with regard to our grass-roots
cadres, some of them are probably less competent, and they are
not able to dissipate these conflicts or problems."
In another widely remarked statement, Chen Xiwen, an economics
vice minister who oversees agricultural affairs, saluted the
Internet's role in allowing the central government to learn of
unrest more quickly and praised demonstrating farmers for "knowing
how to protect their rights."
The people of Xinchang were reluctant to speak openly about the
uprising because they would be subject to immediate arrest if
identified. But from conversations with numerous residents, many
of whom took part in the demonstrations, it was possible to put
together a detailed picture of the events.
In Xinchang, as with many of the recent protests, the spark
involved claims of environmental degradation. An explosion at
Jinxing Pharmaceutical this month in a vessel containing deadly
chemicals reportedly killed one worker and contaminated a lot of
the water downstream. Villagers say they appointed a group of
representatives to present demands for compensation, including
free health examinations and medical care for people who live
near the plants, which produces a strain of antibiotics called
quinolones.
When they sent a group on July 4 to demand an audience with
factory officials, they say, security guards beat the
representatives. The next day, the villagers returned in larger
numbers and managed to grab a security officer, whom they
acknowledged beating. As word spread of the beating of the
village representatives and of the worker's death in the
explosion, villagers demanded the closing of the factory.
"Our fields won't produce grain anymore," said a
46-year-old woman who lives near the plant. "We don't dare
to eat food grown from anywhere near here."
Her husband, a former machine operator, said he had to quit
working recently because of weakness and nausea. When local
officials posted a notice saying they would reopen the plant a
few days after the fatal explosion, he had been one of the first
demonstrators to arrive on the scene, charging the gates and
bursting into the factory with a small crowd of fellow
protesters.
"They are making poisonous chemicals for foreigners that
the foreigners don't dare produce in their own countries,"
the man said.
Explaining why he had been willing to rush into the plant,
despite signs warning of toxic chemicals all about, he said,
"It is better to die now, forcing them out, than to die of
a slow suicide."
Xinchang officials bought some time in the conflict by
temporarily suspending operations at the plant, sending teams
door to door in many of the neighborhoods to urge residents not
to harbor troublemakers and promising to consider the villagers'
grievances carefully.
Tensions spiked again, though, last Thursday, when the city
posted a notice saying that production would resume at the plant
the next day. The notice warned that an explosion could take
place inside the factory unless the chemical processes already
begun were allowed to run for another week.
Sensing a ruse, the villagers refused, demanding a guarantee in
the form of a security deposit of more than $2 million to allow
the plant to start up again temporarily. "We don't trust
them," said a man who lives near the plant. "They have
told us lies many times before and have never addressed our
problems."
The next day and each day since, the villagers have massed by
the thousands outside the factory's gates, smashing the
company's sign, wrecking a guard post and smashing windows with
stones. The factory, meanwhile, has remained closed.
In many of China's other recent riots, word has spread fast
among organizers and protesters by way of cellphone messages,
allowing crowds to mass quickly and helping demonstrators
coordinate tactics and slogans.
In Xinchang, however, residents say new technology, like the
cellphone, has played little part. Instead, many residents say
they were moved to action after years of unhappiness about
industrial pollution by copies of newspaper headlines from
Dongyang. That city, a mere 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, away,
was the scene this spring of one of China's biggest riots, in
which more than 10,000 residents routed the police in a riot
over pollution from a pesticide factory.
Despite tight controls on news coverage of the incident, the
riot in Dongyang, where the chemical factory remains closed
months later, has entered Chinese folklore as proof that
determined citizens acting en masse can force the authorities to
reverse course and address their needs.
"As for the Dongyang riot, everyone knows about it," a
man in his 20s said. "Six policemen were killed, and the
chief had the tendons in his arms and legs severed. Perhaps they
went too far, but we must be treated as human beings."