Explosion Fuels Protests of China Chemical Plants

[News_Editor]

Laborers clean up near the wreckage of part of a paraxylene (PX) plant after an explosion in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, on July 30, 2013. (Photo: Reuters)

BEIJING — An explosion at a plant that produces the toxic chemical paraxylene has added to the growing opposition to such plants in China, on the same day a state-run newspaper prominently urged the public to accept the industry as safe.

Tuesday’s blast at the plant at Zhangzhou city in southeastern Fujian province caused no chemical leaks, officials said, but environmental activists seized on the accident as a warning of potential problems at factories that produce paraxylene, or PX, which is used in printing and to make polyesters. The blast shattered windows in a nearby village, injuring some residents, including Lin Jianzhou, whose leg was injured when his roof collapsed, the Xinhua News Agency said, citing reporters on the scene.

PX plants around the country have become a hot-button issue, especially among China’s growing middle class.

“The government does not have the sincerity to handle such things properly. They should draw a lesson from this accident in Zhangzhou,†said Li Jiarui, a food researcher who protested against a PX factory in Kunming city in southwest Yunnan in May.

Coincidentally, the ruling Communist Party’s main newspaper published a feature Tuesday aimed at defusing public fears about the industry, saying that PX plants are necessary for the domestic economy, that they are safe and that they have never had a major accident.

“Over recent years, chemical plants were often associated with environmental pollution,†the People’s Daily said. It quoted Li Junfa, the chief engineer of China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute, which advises the country’s top planning agency, as saying that PX companies have been “wronged†in this respect.

“Since the first PX facility was built in Shanghai in 1985, the country now has more than 10 sets of facilities, all functioning properly. There has not been a single major accident,†said the piece.

The explosion Tuesday at the plant in Zhangzhou, close to the Taiwan Strait, was sparked by a fire, Xinhua reported.

Initial investigations found a cracked hydrogen pipeline triggered the fire during a pressure test, Xinhua said, citing the local government. The blast did not heavily damage the plant, nor result in any chemical leaks, the report said.

A fire official in Zhangzhou city, who gave only his surname, Tu, confirmed the predawn explosion.

The plant attracted protests even before it was built. It was slated for the densely populated city of Xiamen in Fujian, but protests in 2007 by residents concerned about potential health hazards succeeded in getting it moved to a less populated area in Zhangzhou.

A similar protest in 2011 in the northern port city of Dalian ended with a promise by the city government to shut a PX plant and move it out of the downtown area.

And in May, protests erupted over plans for a PX plant in Kunming where residents said they feared authorities had failed to adequately assess its risks.

“The fact that they put such a big project in Kunming shows that they looked only at the economic side and ignored the social and environmental sides,†said Li, who studies risks of genetically modified food.

Short-term exposure to paraxylene can cause eye, nose or throat irritation in humans, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chronic exposure can affect the central nervous system and cause death.

After decades of having no say in the development-at-all-costs policies that have polluted the country’s air and waterways, people in China’s rising middle class have increasingly turned to public protests to voice their concerns.

Source: Irrawaddy.org

[boomerangutang]

Chinese, as much as any other people worldwide, are infatuated with chemicals as an inexorable part of their lives. Problems are inevitable, when chemicals come to dominate peoples' existence. Some famous author (Rudyard Kipling?) wondered whether this species will end in fire or ice. Methinks it will end in a pool of toxic chemicals.

[Publicus]

The CCP-PRC does require Environmental Impact Statements in some of its project construction. However, the EIS in most cases is classified as confidential government information that is never released to the public.

This is only one complaint among the PRChinese people who have begun to protest more against environmental pollution than they had been protesting against the many land grabs CCP officials have made, which dispossess people of their land and homes in favor of housing and mall developments, some of which never have opened.

The data show the land, air and water of the CCP-PRC are foul and pose immediate dangers to human health and life.

China Pollution Poses Test for Regime as Middle Class Protests

http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-07-11/china-pollution-poses-test-for-regime-as-middle-class-protests.html

A Large Majority of Chinese Vow to Take On Pollution With Protest
Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-large-majority-of-chinese-vow-to-take-on-pollution-with-protest#ixzz2ahJkXEyi

The numbers from a survey released earlier this month by the Public Opinion Research Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University bear this out.

According to the study, up to 80% of citizens believe that environmental protection should be a higher priority than economic development.

And 78% of those surveyed (3,400 people from 34 cities) said that they will participate in protests if pollution facilities are built near their homes—even though public protest is generally outlawed by the authorities.

Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-large-majority-of-chinese-vow-to-take-on-pollution-with-protest#ixzz2ahJVeMI8

'Get out': Over 1,000 take to the streets in China to protest oil refinery

http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/16/18294227-get-out-over-1000-take-to-the-streets-in-china-to-protest-oil-refinery?lite

"We don't need speedy development. What we need is a healthy and peaceful country," Kunming resident Liu Yuncheng told The Associated Press. "I still haven't given birth to a baby. I want to be pregnant and I want a healthy baby."

[boomerangutang]

It's a good sign that Chinese have been and are ready to buck establishment dictates - in regard to protesting pollution. However, I would venture their underlying tolerance for bad air and bad water, is higher than the average westerner. I base this assumption on observations of Thais, over the past 30 years, and Thais share many similarities (and bloodlines) with Chinese.

For example, when there's a protest in China re; a dirty river, or an overly dusty city, like Beijing, it appears the problem is quite grave by the time the protesters make their presence felt. People with a lower tolerance for filth, might speak up and protest sooner.

Some added examples: a neighborhood in the US or Europe could conceivably lodge protests if a pack of dogs barked all night, or trash was strewn along streets. In China, such things are taken in stride, or probably hardly noticed. 'Light pollution' (leaving too many lights on at night) is considered important in some US regions. In China and Thailand, it's never an issue.

Edited August 1, 2013 by boomerangutang

[Publicus]

It's a good sign that Chinese have been and are ready to buck establishment dictates - in regard to protesting pollution. However, I would venture their underlying tolerance for bad air and bad water, is higher than the average westerner. I base this assumption on observations of Thais, over the past 30 years, and Thais share many similarities (and bloodlines) with Chinese.

For example, when there's a protest in China re; a dirty river, or an overly dusty city, like Beijing, it appears the problem is quite grave by the time the protesters make their presence felt. People with a lower tolerance for filth, might speak up and protest sooner.

Some added examples: a neighborhood in the US or Europe could conceivably lodge protests if a pack of dogs barked all night, or trash was strewn along streets. In China, such things are taken in stride, or probably hardly noticed. 'Light pollution' (leaving too many lights on at night) is considered important in some US regions. In China and Thailand, it's never an issue.

True and more so.

After four years in the CCP-PRC I saw that by the time the population comes out to protest some problem of the environment, it's already a hopeless cause, too late to do anything. Polluters can be shut down, as they often are, but the damage to the environment is severe and no one has been able or willing to try to address such severe problems because they're often not reversible unless there's an effort which is massive, comprehensive, highly expensive and requires a lot of uninterrupted time to pass to redress.

They can't shut down all the factories that make a given metro area of the PRC look like midnight at noon, which occasionally happens. In Guangzhou City where I lived, which is a city of 13 million three hours by train to Hong Kong, I could taste the sickening air, yet life goes on there with nary a complaint.

Guangzhou is a center of leather production, so if even some of those notorious polluter plants and factories were shut down, a lot of angry, suddenly jobless people would start grumbling and might even protest against the Party and the government in general. So life does go on there and in many places like it throughout the PRC, where gagging and coughing throughout the day is the reality.

There are protests occurring as the articles posted to this thread show. But the above is true, i.e., by the time the sheeple are protesting, the situation already is hopeless. And not everyone suffering pollution wants or dares to protest, often for economic reasons, reasons of livlihood.

Protest of course is strictly prohibited by the CCP - unauthorized protests. Yet the CIA reports that unauthorized protests in the PRC have exceeded 100,000 in number each of the past several years. Unauthorized protests also means unreported in the state owned and controlled media.

Two years before he left office last year, former Prez Hu Jintao engineered a scheme by which the CCP accepts protests about the environment, which had already been happening anyway. It was either condone it or have to bust a lot of people's heads on a daily basis throughout the PRC. So it will be interesting to see how the outbreak of protest against destruction of the environment develops.

That is, whether the environmental protest morphs into a more generalized protest against the party and the state, or whether they remain confined to the single issue of the environment, thereby not posing any problem to the CCP or to the state (the two being one and the same anyway). Not yet anyway.