FT: “Even in China, David sometimes beats Goliath – though it’s sometimes hard to be sure.
This week, residents of Songjiang – a suburb of Shanghai which has gained fame around the world for having over 10,000 dead pigs floating in its water supply – found that though they could not vanquish the porcine invader, they had scared away an intruder from the corporate world. Shanghai Guoxuan High-Tech Power Energy company said it was abandoning plans for a battery factory in Songjiang, after residents protested on the streets and on the internet against it.
In a statement broadcast on local TV, the company said it would return the land allocated by local government and “will not seek any compensation”. It said it was halting its existing operations and pulling out of the area completely.
Residents staged street protests against the plant regularly since late April and more than 10,000 signed a petition against the project with many others voicing their opposition to it on the internet. At least one protester was reported to have been injured by police.
But Chinese citizens know that plants vanquished in one location in China, by “not in my backyard” or “nimby” protests, often pop up in someone else’s backyard. Residents of neighbouring Jinshan, another industrial area on the outskirts of Shanghai, now fear that the plant will end up on their doorstep.
“We already have so many chemical plants. We really cannot tolerate one more battery plant. Shall we protest together?” asks one user on a Jinshan property owner’s online forum.
Ordinary Chinese are less and less ready to pay the environmental price for economic development – or rather, more and more ready to see someone else pay it. This week, up to a thousand people protested in Kunming, in southwest China, the second large demonstration this month against plans to produce paraxylene (PX), a chemical used in making fabrics and plastic bottles, at a plant in the town.
Protestors complained that the environmental impact assessment for the project was suspect, because it was done by one subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corp, the country’s largest oil and gas producer and supplier, while the plant would be operated by another. That is the equivalent of “grandson assessing Grandpa,” said one Weibo user.
Last November, the eastern city of Ningbo suspended a petrochemical project after days of street protests. The year before, big protests against a PX plant in the northeastern city of Dalian forced the city government to suspend it.”
via China’s protesters: winning battles? | beyondbrics.
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