When the wind blows in one Shanghai suburb, residents can smell the stench rising from a towering garbage dump, feared to be so harmful it can make people vomit and cause birth defects.
Now residents of Songjiang District are raising a stink about the future of the landfill, one of a series of recent protests across China as people hold the government more accountable for health and environmental problems.
“All the garbage in Songjiang comes here,” said Chen Chunhui, who grew up nearby.
“This is a residential district, so people are making a fuss. They say if you smell it, your baby will be a freak,” he added.
Hundreds took to the streets in late May and dozens again early last month to oppose the landfill and a planned garbage incinerator, which officials had proposed to solve the festering problem.
The May protest is believed to be Shanghai’s largest since 2008, when hundreds marched against an extension of the city’s high-speed “maglev” train line, prompting the government to suspend the project indefinitely.
The Songjiang protesters — who are largely young, educated and not necessarily Shanghai natives — claim the incinerator would spew dangerous toxins and slammed the local government’s lack of transparency on the project.
Government officials announced in May that Songjiang would build the 250 million yuan (US$40 million) incinerator on its current -landfill site as the population swells.
However, residents claim the incinerator could affect the health of hundreds of thousands of people and called for the landfill, which towers up to 17m and covers an area the size of a football field, to be moved.
Environmental pollution and perceived health threats are sparking protests elsewhere in China, helped by social media which allows organizers to publicize their causes and rally others despite tight government control.
Last year, thousands of protesters halted production at a polluting solar panel factory in the eastern city of Haining, while residents in the northeastern city of Dalian stopped a planned petrochemical plant.
Earlier this month in Sichuan Province, hundreds of protesters clashed with police over a planned metals plant in Shifang city and forced the project to be scrapped.
“This nascent urban middle class is increasingly unwilling to accept perceived threats to their quality of life, so you are having a greater tendency for people to take to the streets,” said Phelim Kine, senior Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
China had an estimated 180,000 protests in 2010 and the numbers have risen steadily since the 1990s, according to estimates by sociology professor Sun Liping (孫立平) of Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The government has grown more sophisticated in handling them since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when soldiers fired on -protesters, Kine said.
However, the government still targets protest leaders, seeking to dissuade them using soft and hard tactics, he added.
In the Songjiang case, Shanghai authorities have allowed the protests to take place, amid a massive police presence, but have not sought to clear away demonstrators with mass detentions.
In the May demonstration, police blocked protesters from marching to the nearby university district, fearing greater student participation.
In the smaller protest last month, organizers held a dialogue with authorities, which allowed the demonstration to take place as long as it remained orderly.
However, local authorities have not yet given any signal of giving in to the protesters.
“Trust us, we will be spending so much money that there’s no reason for us not to make sure it operates properly and safely,” Songjiang sanitation bureau official Xu Qiyong (徐其永) told the state-backed Global Times newspaper.
Trust remains an issue.
“There is no transparency. There is no confidence in the government,” one protester said.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS