The Perceived Threat of Anticipated Pollution

In October 2001, local authorities began construction of a chemical park in Huaxi. Dongnong 东农 Company, a notorious pesticide factory, was to be relocated to this park. The Party secretary of Huaxi No. 5 village opposed this move and attempted to stop it. He consulted an expert, investigated the polluted village where the company was then located, and penned a leaflet entitled “A portrait of Dongnong Company” (hereafter referred to as “The portrait”). The Party secretary anonymously sent about 150 copies of the leaflet to influential Huaxi villagers. It was received on about 17 October, and a protest was staged primarily during the following three days.

“The portrait” framed the environmental threat from Dongnong Company in a way that resonated with Huaxi villagers' cultural values about lineage and offspring. The emphasis was on the potential destruction of their lineage because the pollution might harm the “quality” of their descendants.Footnote ¹⁶ First, it depicted the frightening scenario in the village of Luzhai 陆宅 which had already been polluted by the company:

“The portrait” continued by listing the products manufactured by Dongnong Company as well as seven dire consequences if the factory were to move to Huaxi. The first two consequences were described as follows:

“The portrait” used powerful rhetoric. It enumerated the previous protests against the company, noting that the provincial governor had issued an order to shut down the factory. It warned villagers that a gas bomb might land in Huaxi. “The portrait” concluded with a call to arms to Huaxi villagers: “It is better to die fighting today than to be killed by poison tomorrow!”

The environmental threat described in “The portrait” caused panic and generated a sense of injustice among the villagers for three reasons. First, the villagers were able to confirm through various channels the veracity of the claims. Some called acquaintances in Luzhai and others personally visited the polluted site.Footnote ¹⁸ Second, the villagers believed that the relocation of the company to Huaxi would be unjust and questioned it in the following ways: “If the company harmed urbanites, won't it also harm us rural residents?”Footnote ¹⁹ and “If the chemical factory is not toxic, why does it need to be relocated from Luzhai to Huaxi?”Footnote ²⁰ Finally, Wang 王, the surname of most residents in Huaxi village, like the Lu in Luzhai, was also a prestigious family line. Many villagers worried that their lineage would be destroyed by the chemical factory.Footnote ²¹

The majority of villagers in Huaxi learned about the potential environmental and health dangers from Dongnong Company through “The portrait.”Footnote ²² Prior to the appearance of the leaflet, the villagers' only complaint was about the low rent that the company would pay for the use of the land. One villager recalled:

One villager stated that “people were emotionally charged at that time, and most villagers thought ‘The portrait’ made its point.”Footnote ²⁴

The environmental threat depicted by “The portrait” prompted the villagers to take action. One villager, who later testified in court, said: “I was so worried. The leaflet said the company was toxic and it was harmful to our health. I therefore posted the leaflet on the wall near the front door of my house.”Footnote ²⁵ Other people acted collectively. Two villagers, whose houses were closest to the industrial park, produced 1,000 copies of “The portrait” at their own expense and pasted them on walls throughout the village. They also had their wives distribute copies in the market. One villager recalled:

Three other villagers started a door-to-door campaign the day after they received “The portrait.” They circulated “A joint appeal to villagers in Huaxi No. 5 village,” which soon gathered more than 600 signatures. The appeal called for a referendum regarding the relocation. It contended that even if the relocation plan were approved through a referendum, the company should be required to sign a document with supplemental terms stipulating its responsibilities to observe environmental regulations strictly, provide safe drinking water, offer villagers free medical check-ups, and clean up any pollution on the land after the expiration of its lease.

Concerned about the safety of their health and crops, villagers seized every opportunity to question the local officials about whether or not Dongnong Company produced poisonous waste. Xu 许, the Party secretary of Huaixi town, repeatedly reassured the petitioners that: “Dongnong Company will meet all our environmental criteria. Its waste water will be clean enough to brush one's teeth with and to cultivate fish, and its waste will be able to be used to feed our pigs.”Footnote ²⁷ Despite these promises, he failed to reassure the anxious villagers. On the evening of 20 October 2001, dozens of villagers went to a restaurant where Party Secretary Xu was dining with his associates to demand another dialogue on the environmental issue. Again, Xu exaggerated the environmental safety of Dongnong Company, but this time his response infuriated the villagers. Some villagers shouted, “Drag him to the chemical industrial park! Make him take a look and smell the waste water!”Footnote ²⁸ The call was answered: after Xu was dragged to the industrial park, where thousands of villagers had already assembled, he was forced to walk around the park with bare feet and to smell the foul waste water from the two factories. After Xu was rescued by a village cadre and sent to the hospital, the villagers destroyed the fence around Dongnong Company and smashed the doors and windows of the other two factories. Some vandalized property and stole computers or telephones. This became known as the “October 20th Incident,” which marked a high tide but also the end of the first episode of the Huaxi environmental struggle.

The protest failed to prevent the relocation of Dongnong Company. Worse still, 12 villagers were prosecuted for disturbing social order and ten were jailed for between one and three years. The Party secretary of Huaxi No. 5 village, although not on the scene during the incident, served the longest time behind bars. As the author of “The portrait,” he was blamed for inciting the “October 20th Incident.”

The events in Huaxi indicate that an effectively framed environmental threat may motivate Chinese villagers to engage in protest. In this case, “The portrait” provided Huaxi villagers with information about the impending environmental threat. It rendered the environmental threat convincing by depicting a real environmental disaster. Its powerful rhetoric motivated the villagers to take action and created a sense of injustice among the villagers, and the outrageous response by the township secretary aggravated this sense of injustice and became the immediate trigger of a violent riot.

Political Opportunities and the Piggybacking of Issues

The contention in 2001 was a single-issue protest during which villagers concerned about an immediate environmental threat took action to oppose the relocation of a polluting factory. However, environmentally concerned actors do not necessarily base their protests on purely environmental claims. They may link environmental problems to other issues so as to apply multiple pressures on local authorities.Footnote ²⁹ If they perceive more opportunities from other issues, they may even adopt a detour strategy, pursuing environmental claims by seeking redress for other grievances.

The 2001 protest in Huaxi failed to prevent the relocation of Dongnong Company, but it significantly influenced subsequent protests. First, the harsh official response to the “October 20th Incident” forestalled further protests for two and a half years, thereby clearing the way for the relocation of the plant and a large expansion of the park. It was not until April 2004 that Huaxi villagers once again attempted to voice their discontent by initiating a year-long collective petition. However, after failing to address their environmental grievances through institutional channels, on 24 March 2005, the villagers once again resorted to direct action, blocking the road to the industrial park and maintaining a round-the-clock vigil for two successive months. Ultimately, they forced 11 of the polluting factories off the land.

The harsh response to the 2001 incident also forced Huaxi villagers to adopt a more innovative detour strategy. They pursued environmental claims by seeking redress for land-related grievances (jie tudi wenti zuo huanbao wenzhang 借土地问题做环保文章)Footnote ³⁰ in order to overcome the obstacles in proving the relationship between pollution and damage to the environment and health.Footnote ³¹

Following the expansion of the park, the environment in Huaxi became seriously degraded. The park grew to occupy 960 mu (about 64 hectares) of land and, at its peak, contained 13 factories, mainly producers of chemicals, pesticides, dyes and pharmaceuticals. Nearly all of the factories generated a substantial amount of water and air pollution. According to a deputy head of Huashui 画水 town, pollution caused by the production of weedkillers and defoliators did the greatest harm to vegetation, causing most plants to dieFootnote ³² and vegetables to rot.Footnote ³³ An investigation by the local government after the protest indicated that the pollution from the park had affected about 11,685 mu (about 779 hectares) of land.Footnote ³⁴ Worse still, those agricultural products that remained did not sell owing to fears of poisoning.Footnote ³⁵ This upset the villagers who had long considered their hometown as a place of natural beauty. Villagers living off the land suffered even more as they had not only lost their income from planting cash crops, but also had to buy in vegetables for their own use from other towns. Consequently, the price of vegetables surged after the establishment of the industrial park. These events ultimately presented a real danger to the livelihoods of the villagers.

Huaxi villagers understood the potential adverse health effects of chemical pollution from earlier industrial accidents. Environmental illnesses usually develop in a chronic fashion. During normal production, victims may have difficulty finding evidence to link their illnesses with the pollution. However, they can immediately identify adverse health consequences after accidents occur. An “Urgent report,” submitted to the local government on 12 February 2004, described the suffering after one industrial accident: “A gust of toxic and fetid gas was suddenly discharged from the chemical park. The smell was awful. Villagers had difficulty breathing. Many cried out anxiously: ‘It is hard to bear! Intolerable!’” Another serious accident occurred on 18 October 2004 when a pipeline at Dongnong Company ruptured and leaked toxic gas into the air. An activist wrote in his diary:

The villagers believed that pollution from the industrial park had affected their health, but they understood that it would be hard to prove the relationship between pollution and their illnesses. As one villager said, “Who can see the effects of the pollution on the body?”Footnote ³⁶ Based on this understanding and the failure of their protests on purely environmental grounds in 2001, the Huaxi villagers linked their environmental problems to the issue of illegal land requisitions, since the chemical park had been built on illegally seized land. As demonstrated by the 22 petition letters that we collected, the Huaxi protest leaders framed their claims mostly in terms of violations of land-related regulations. This approach, which we refer to as the piggybacking of contentious issues, although reminiscent of the issue linkage strategy studied by other scholars,Footnote ³⁷ is in fact quite different. The Huaxi villagers essentially made land-related claims, rather than environmental claims, even though their ultimate objective was to oppose environmental pollution.

The piggybacking of issues is used to take advantage of specific political opportunities. From 2002 to 2005, political opportunities opened up for both environmental and land-related protests, but to varying degrees. There were two new opportunities for environmental activists: the passage of the Environmental Impact Assessment Law on 28 October 2002; and the publicity campaign, called the “environmental storm” (huanbao fengbao 环保风暴), launched by the State Environmental Protection Agency to promote enforcement of the new law. However, in their petitions Huaxi villagers seldom cited environmental regulations in support of their claims; instead they frequently cited land regulations. According to the diary written by an activist from 4 August to 14 November 2004, the daily resistance in Huaxi overwhelmingly focused on the land issue. The protest leader disclosed that, “We demanded our land back in order to force them to close the polluting factories.”Footnote ³⁸ The local authorities understood perfectly well this strategy of issue piggybacking. During a meeting of township cadres, one official pointed out: “The villagers, like leeches, are insisting that the local government relocate the chemical park and return their land.”Footnote ³⁹ At the same meeting, the director of the Huashui Land and Resources Station noted:

Most Huaxi villagers were not opposed to their land being used for industrial ends, but they were opposed to it being used for the building of polluting factories. This was further confirmed by a villager who questioned local officials during the 2005 direct action: “Why did you place toxic factories in our village? Why didn't you introduce food factories, processing plants, or furniture companies here? Didn't you notice that there were thousands of people living in the vicinity of the chemical park?”Footnote ⁴¹

Four factors contributed to the formation of this piggybacking strategy during the Huaxi environmental struggle. First, Chinese environmental regulations are generally ambiguous and do not effectively address environmental problems. It is often impossible for victims, not to mention resource-poor farmers, to obtain evidence and establish a causal link between industrial pollution and its adverse consequences. Even with a strong case and a good lawyer, victims of pollution still have no guarantee that they will reach a satisfactory settlement in court.Footnote ⁴² Second, many polluting factories are built on land that has been seized illegally.Footnote ⁴³ This forms the basis for the detour strategy of pursuing environmental claims by seeking redress for land-related grievances. Third, compared with the vague environmental laws, land-related regulations are more straightforward. It is relatively easy for ordinary citizens to prove land abuses by consulting the relevant regulations. That is why the Huaxi villagers, according to the 22 petition letters that we collected, always began their complaints by confidently identifying the clauses in the land regulations that had been violated by the local authorities. Accusations levelled at the polluting chemical factories were secondary, and in fact some petitions made no mention at all of the environmental issue.

Finally, owing to the pressures from an increasing number of protests against illegal land requisitions, the central government was committed to enforcing the land regulations.Footnote ⁴⁴ From 2003 to 2004, the central government issued a series of land regulations to discipline local governments.Footnote ⁴⁵ One such regulation, promulgated on 30 December 2003, presented the greatest threat to the survival of the illegal industrial parks by stipulating that:

Most local governments carried out self-checking and self-rectification in order to avoid punishment.Footnote ⁴⁷ They issued notices revoking the licences of the illegal industrial parks within their jurisdictions, but they often had no intention of enforcing the revocations.Footnote ⁴⁸ On 16 April 2004, the Zhejiang provincial government published a notice in the Zhejiang Daily concerning the cleaning up and rectification of the developmental zones. The chemical park in Huaxi was on the list of sites to be shut down. Forced to follow suit, on 26 July 2004 the Dongyang county government issued 14 similar documents. These documents stipulated that factories in the Huaxi chemical park should return any illegally seized land to the villagers.

The Huaxi villagers acted mainly in light of these land-related documents. First, even though they were still subject to repression, the notice published in the Zhejiang Daily emboldened the villagers to begin a new round of protests. Second, the villagers urged the local authorities to enforce the regulations. For example, after obtaining the 14 documents issued by the Dongyang county government, the villagers sent a letter of appeal to the county government and the Huashui town government. The letter stated that:

The head of Huashui town confirmed that the documents issued by the Dongyang government had provided the Huaxi villagers with a protest weapon. He noted: “The decision presented a great opportunity for the villagers … They argued that the government should order the factories to be shut down. They then would have to move off the land.”Footnote ⁴⁹

During the 2005 direct action, protesters in Huaxi formulated an even more distinctly land-oriented frame of protest. A widely circulated poster read: “Give back our land, and we want to survive; give back our land, and we want to be healthy; give back our land, and we want our offspring to prosper; give back our land, and we want a clean environment.” In this frame, “giving back our land” served as an indirect method to achieve the goals of keeping the environment clean and maintaining good physical health.

This strategy contributed to the success of the Huaxi environmental protest.Footnote ⁵⁰ The easily identified abuse of the land regulations not only legitimated the Huaxi villagers' protest, but also constrained the local government's use of repression, as the Party secretary of Huashui town noted in his report:

Community Relations, Economic Dependency and the Silence of Contentious Villagers

After the 11 polluting factories were forced out of Huaxi, one might think that some villagers, especially the protest leaders, would have become converts to the issue of environmental protection.Footnote ⁵¹ The protest did promote environmental concern among villagers in Huaxi, as some interviewees have noted: “The masses now pay more attention to pollution.”Footnote ⁵² Several protest leaders even tried to establish an environmental NGO.Footnote ⁵³ However, this did not guarantee that the villagers would take collective action against all environmental problems in the locality. Local conditions, especially community relations and economic dependency on the polluting enterprises, mediate the translation of environmental concern into environmental action.

When the first author visited Huaxi in April 2007, she found it difficult to associate the people in this village with the protesters who had fought so fiercely against chemical pollution and who had won a huge concession from the local authorities. Many parts of Huaxi were covered with huge piles of plastic waste. Hundreds of family-run plastic waste recycling workshops dotted the landscape. These recycling workshops caused great harm to the environment and to the health of the villagers. Untreated waste water discharged from the workshops covered the roads, seeping into both the soil and the drinking water supply. In addition, shrill noises emitted during the plastic shredding process could be heard throughout the day. There was also a stench from melting plastic and burning waste. Surprisingly, there had been no serious protests against the pollution caused by this cottage industry. Some former protest leaders were even participating in this polluting business. Why were veterans of the earlier environmental protest movement not taking a stand against the pollution caused by this industry?

Both the villagers and the local officials knew about the adverse effects of the pollution caused by the plastic waste recycling. One woman recalled that she had felt an unbearable itch after one of her feet had accidentally slipped into a ditch that was full of waste water from a plastic waste processing workshop.Footnote ⁵⁴ During a focus group interview, all of the six participating villagers agreed that the pollution was serious and was causing health problems. One of the most prominent activists in the Huaxi environmental protest, who was now in the business of plastic waste recycling, admitted that the money he was making could not offset the environmental damage caused by his business activities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Local officials exaggerated the severity of the pollution from this cottage business so as to imply that the Huaxi villagers' protests against the pollution from the former chemical factories were unreasonable. For example, the Party secretary of Huashui town commented sarcastically:

A deputy head of Huashui town strongly agreed with the Party secretary. Another deputy head of the town mentioned that in Minghuan 明焕, a village adjacent to Huaxi, almost every household was engaged in this business and that the village remained enveloped in a foul cloud of smoke. He stated that the pollution caused by plastic waste processing was far more serious than that emitted from the former chemical factories.Footnote ⁵⁷

Two main factors affected the translation of environmental concern into collective action in Huaxi. One was economic dependency. Plastic waste recycling had long been a pillar industry in Huashui town.Footnote ⁵⁸ The town boasted the largest market for plastic waste in east China. In 2007, approximately 20,000 people in Huashui lived off this cottage industry, with turnover that year amounting to over 2.4 billion yuan. More than ten enterprises had a turnover of ten million yuan, and many more workshops had a turnover of over one million yuan.Footnote ⁵⁹

In contrast, the former chemical park brought nothing but harm to the villagers. There were over 1,000 employees working in the 13 factories before the 2005 protest, yet only around 20 of them came from the villages in Huashui town.Footnote ⁶⁰ Most officials thought that if more local villagers had been employed by the polluting factories, the protest would have never occurred. They often referred to the Hengdian 横店 GroupFootnote ⁶¹ as an example.Footnote ⁶² Officials believed that the Hengdian Group was able to suppress any protests because most of its employees were local villagers. Therefore, the Group had ample network resources to deal with popular resistance. As the former Party secretary of Huashui town explained: “If anyone within the Group makes trouble, he will soon be fired. As a result, no one dares to resist. If any village makes trouble, the employees from that village will have to return home and engage in thought reform work.”Footnote ⁶³ Another township cadre agreed that when local people benefited from the polluting companies, “things did not get out of hand.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The rationale that economic dependency impedes environmental mobilization holds true in Huaxi. A key activist in the Huaxi environmental protest, who also considered the pollution from the plastic waste processing industry a serious threat to the health of the local people, lamented that there were “too many workshops related to this business”Footnote ⁶⁵ and thus it would be impossible to take action against the pollution it produced. In Minghuan village, nearly every household was becoming rich from this business. More than 100 families in the village owned a car, which was (and is) a luxury in the countryside. As a result, most villagers seemed to be quite satisfied with the status quo. A prominent local entrepreneur explained: “The pollution is very serious in the village, but the masses do not have any complaints because they have reaped benefits from the recycling business.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The distinction made by villagers between pollution produced by wairen 外人 (outsiders) and zijiren 自己人 (insiders) has had a negative effect on the mobilization of anti-pollution protests against the plastic waste recycling cottage industry. Zijiren could be family members, relatives, friends, or others with whom one has established a special relationship. For rural residents, people from the same village or the same town are considered to be zijiren and are often treated differently from wairen.Footnote ⁶⁷ During our focus group interview, when the villagers were asked why they did not take action to address the pollution from the cottage industry, a former environmental activist answered bluntly: “Those workshops belong to our fellow villagers.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Other interviewees revealed that they did not take action against their neighbours because they did not want to damage relations in the neighbourhood.Footnote ⁶⁹

However, the history of contention has indeed left a mark and to some extent has blurred the boundary between pollution produced by wairen and pollution produced by zijiren. After the 2005 protest, the villagers began to monitor the two surviving factories that were operated by local entrepreneurs. According to a report on “Our living environment,” submitted to the Dongyang county government by the Shunda 顺达 Dyeing Corporation on 28 August 2006, it was clear that the factory was very “disturbed” by the villagers' environmental oversight: