SHANGHAI/BEIJING | Thu Nov 1, 2012 5:23pm EDT
(Reuters) – It looked like another victory for the people when the Chinese city of Ningbo announced the suspension on Sunday of a petrochemical project after days of street protests by citizens concerned it would pollute their community.
It may turn out to be more complicated.
As China’s increasingly affluent urban population battles back against the breakneck growth-at-all-costs model that has fuelled the economy for three decades, environmental activists say the apparently
straightforward narrative that has played out several times in recent years – government backs down, citizens win – is simplistic.
A spokesman for the Ningbo government said in a statement on Sunday that there would be no further work done on the massive project, which includes a facility for the production of paraxylene (PX), a potentially harmful chemical used in making some plastics, pending further “scientific debate.”
But a source in Ningbo closely linked to the project told Reuters that once the public furor dies down, China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) will likely proceed with the $8.8 billion dollar expansion to the plant in Ningbo’s Zhenhai district, including PX production.
Public worries could force the project owners to downplay or disguise the PX facility by renaming it as something like “affiliated PTA product capacity expansion,” the source said speaking on condition of anonymity. PTA is a downstream product made using PX, and a key component in producing polyester.
The rationale for the government to beat a public retreat in Ningbo and other places like it is clear enough.
“Capitulating relatively quickly to the demands of the local populace seems a worthy trade-off when thinking about the potential for these large scale protests to spread and transform into something much larger,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a book on China’s environmental challenges.
“Of course, this is not a sustainable governance model, but it is clear that neither Beijing nor local officials know what to do.”
The Ningbo protest came at a highly sensitive time for the government about two weeks before a once-a-decade leadership transition within the Communist Party.
SORT OF CANCELED
A quiet resumption of the Ningbo plan would hardly be unheard of.
“Previously, similar cases were reactivated without much scrutiny from the public. The public is much less organized, so when the crisis calms down it’s difficult for them to monitor what’s going on,” said Li Bo, Secretary General of the NGO Friends of Nature in China.
