China Environmental Law

On Monday we wrote about a protest in the “affluent Changying district of east Beijing” concerning a neighborhood landfill and waste incineration facility.  Less than a month earlier another protest occurred in “a rural corner of southwest China’s Yunnan Province where pollution from cement kilns has changed lives and turned peaceful villages into scenes of violence.”  Caijing has done an excellent job reporting on the Yunnan protests: Dusty Struggle in a Cement Kiln’s Shadow. 

In Yunnan’s Huaping County

Dust falls like rain, garden leaves turn from green to gray, and farmers find strange balls the size of fists in the guts of slaughtered pigs.

One villager told Caijing, “When you go out for a walk, your clothes will be covered with dust. When turning on flashlight at night, you will see dust falling like rain,” he said, adding, “There is always dust on the furniture that can never be wiped away.” Vegetables are never clean, the villager said.

The source of the dust is a nearby privately-owned Gao Yuan cement factory which has gone through several owners.  It appears that both the local environmental authorities and village government have been supportive of the villagers’ concerns.

In 2006 and ‘07, villagers complained to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and local environmental authorities. Xie Xianheng, head of Huaping’s environment protection bureau, told Caijing that his agency “paid a lot of attention to the issue.”

To back the claim, Xie presented documents of the seven supervisory and disciplinary mandates issued against Gao Yuan [the owner of the kilns]. The comprised six ordered suspensions of construction, closing production lines and stopping random discharges of pollutants. The most recent included a 50,000 yuan fine.

“The factory promised to execute the orders every time,” Xie said. “But their promises were never realized.”

The residents who lived in the shadow of the kilns had taken matters into their own hands and reached an agreement with the kiln owners to address their pollution concerns.  The agreement consisted of an annual payment of 300 yuan ($42) per villager and the promise of a tap water pipe network.  When it appeared the current owner was experiencing financial woes, and the fulfillment of the agreement appeared to be in jeopardy, hundreds of villagers on July 29

blocked the gate of the Gao Yuan factory for three days until the local government intervened. Each of the 1,800 villagers was paid 200 yuan in compensation. However, the water pipe issue was unresolved.

The villagers returned to the factory on August 3 to resolve the open issues but were told by the owner [or former owner-the corporate history of the facility is a little sketchy] to return the next morning.  This was apparently a trap.

Shortly after the villagers had assembled the next day, “13 trucks full of boisterous young men drew up.”  In the trucks were “piles of rubber poles about two meters long.”  Matters quickly “deteriorated into violence” and the villagers were beaten by the young thugs.  Fortunately, the police were called, promptly responded, and stopped the beatings.  They permitted the villagers to go on a retaliatory rampage directed against the kiln company’s property: “[a]s long as the villagers did not hurt anyone, police did not stop them, so as to avoid intensifying the conflict.”

The dispute was ultimately resolved with an agreement to increase the amount of compensation paid to the effected villagers.  As Caijing notes:

villagers . . . consider the compensation as the highest priority. Once they are compensated, villages will tolerate the pollution caused by factories.

Wang Canfa, director of the institute of environmental and resource law study of the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, told Caijing, “This is common in developing areas. Their sense of environmental protection is comparatively rudimentary.”

He explained that real environmental protection means preventing pollution rather than monetary compensation. Villagers will be victims if the “pollution-and-compensation” approach persists, he said.

Something tells me the protesters in Beijing would not have been satisfied with 300 RMB per year and a promise of running water.  Is it any wonder polluting factories are moving to the hinterlands? 

But what can be done?  Other than the cement kiln owners, its hard to find any villains in this story.  The local political, environmental, and police authorities appear to have acted conscientiously and in good faith.  The environmental authorities , however, did complain of a lack of “power” (”The severest measure we can adopt is to fine them. But you can neither cut their electricity, nor stop the water supply”) and personnel (staffing levels at the local environmental bureau were compared unfavorably to the local birth control bureau).  Correcting these problems would be a good start toward tackling China’s rural pollution woes.