Posted on 08/22/2005 3:59:19 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Toxic waste sparks violent protest at China factory
Mon Aug 22, 3:05 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese protesters set fire to factory buildings and police cars in a clash sparked by toxic waste, police and residents said on Monday, the latest illustration of a growing wave of public dissent.
Saturday's violence at the Tian Neng Battery Co. was also the third protest in the eastern province of Zhejiang in recent months caused by pollution, highlighting the environmental price of China's rise to become the world's seventh-largest economy.
"It's very serious. There was a clash between protesters and the police. Some people were injured," said an employee of the post office in the county of Meishan who declined to be identified.
"Some children died of lead pollution and the demonstration might have been initiated by the parents."
Calls to the factory went unanswered and an official at the county government said he had not heard of any violence.
But a police officer in Meishan acknowledged there had been a protest, saying police had rushed to the scene to maintain order. She refused to give further details.
Residents said children were falling ill from high levels of lead that had poisoned water and vegetables in several villages in the area.
"A lot of children in our area have too much lead in their bodies and it will greatly affect their growth," said a receptionist at a Meishan hotel surnamed Han.
"People burned the factory. The office building, workshops, and the factory's products were all set on fire," she said.
Four police cars had also been set alight, she said, adding there was heavy security presence in the area and police were rounding up suspects.
Protests in China are becoming increasingly common despite Communist leaders' obsession with maintaining stability, triggered by factors from pollution and corruption to a growing gap between rich and poor.
The Ministry of Public Security has been quoted as saying there were more than 74,000 protests last year alone and the government has warned the wealth gap could be the cause of yet more unrest if no action is taken to narrow the difference.
A team from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security found the wealth gap had been widening since 2003 despite measures to increase incomes among the rural poor, including scrapping agricultural taxes, the China Daily newspaper said on Monday.
"We are going to hit the red-light scenario after 2010 if there are no effective solutions," the newspaper quoted ministry researcher Su Hainan as saying.
Although China is the world's fastest-growing major economy, the ministry team found rural incomes last year averaged only about $355, less than a third of urban incomes. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has said some 26 million rural Chinese live in absolute poverty, earning less than $80 a year.
"The government's top priority is to make those farmers still in poverty earn more," the report said.
Hundreds of villagers in eastern China riot against polluting factory (battery factories)
I am not sure if Jianxia is part of Meishan county or its neighbor. Chinese regime must be really slow to react to the situation.
As for Chinese income distribution, some Chinese expert says that it has 'inverse T' shape, that is, most people are at the rock bottom while precious few are in the higher bracket.
Ping!
let's see... china seems happy to jump on the green wagon for minute amounts of hazardous substances in electronic components, but doesn't give a tinkers dam about gross pollution from a battery factory. figures.
This is one of the great unreported stories. China's economy has been on a tear for nearly a decade. Lots and lots of cheap manufacturing of products sold abroad. Besides a billion people and cheap labor, one of the reasons for cheap production costs is because they take sludge, heavy metals, and all sorts of industrial waste and byproducts and simply throw it in the back yard. That is unsustainable. They are destroying their land - rivers, lakes, waterways, soil, for short term gain.
Well, duh - they burned it down!
I think that the Chinese limit to tolerating such indiscriminate dumping of pollutants is fast approaching. The environmental and the resulting social cost is simply too high. The time of making fast bucks from Chinese products at rock bottom price appears to be passing.
After it gets real bad, then I suspect the USA will be called upon to clean up their mess as well as every other country in the world.
They've already got our Wal Mart dollars.
I think this is part of the natural evolutiopn of a country with growing industrialization. It's happened in other countries, too. Companies in the U.S., sick of high costs and governelnt health and saefty regulations set up shop in another country without such beaurocratic regulations. Pollution and poor working conditions get worse and worse in the new country. The residents and employees start to resist such company policies and loose government regulations and the country introduces health and safety regulations and mandates pollution controls. That's how the regualtions came into existence in the U.S. It has now happened in Mexico where American companies thought they could function with little concern for the environment due to lac of regulation. Mexico got first hadn experience what lack of regulation caused and now Mexico is created strict regulations. CHina is now at the beginning of this process. In a few decades, companies may actually relocate to the U.S. because our regulations may actually be less retrictive than the newer regulations comming into effect in some third world countries.
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