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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but