2015-05-27
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Residents of Tianjin’s Gegu township march to protest pollution from local steel factory, May 26, 2015.
Photo courtesy of an RFA listener
Thousands of people have taken to the streets in a township near the northern Chinese city of Tianjin in recent days in protest at alleged carcinogenic pollution from a nearby iron and steel plant, residents said on Wednesday.
The protests continued on Wednesday amid a strong security presence outside the gates of the Rongcheng Iron and Steel plant in Tianjin’s Gegu township after several thousand angry local residents clashed with police on Tuesday.
“They have sent in a lot of security forces to our neighborhood, who injured some of the local people because they were protesting,” a Gegu resident surnamed Cheng told RFA.
“Two people were beaten up in clashes that started after a kid running through the factory gates fell and got hurt,” he said. “The police came running up and there was a fight and somebody got a bone broken, and they’re now in hospital.”
A local resident surnamed Xue said around half the township’s population of some 8,000 people had turned out in recent days to protest.
“This has been going on for several days, but not one official has come out to deal with this matter on behalf of local people,” Xue said.
“We want to live, and yet our children and grandchildren have been affected by pollution,” he said.
‘Poisonous smell’
“There is pollution in the air and pollution in the ground … The iron and steel plant is too close to our homes,” Xue said.
“There is a horrible smell coming out of it which is probably poisonous,” he said, adding: “We have a cancer rate of around 20 percent here.”
He said he had been told the figure by doctors at the Tianjin Tumor Hospital, one of the leading cancer hospitals in China.
“We all go there for treatment, and there is a particular tumor that they say comes from [Gegu],” Xue said.
Another Gegu resident, who declined to be named, said the plant had been in operation for more than 20 years.
“Every household has somebody in it who has cancer now,” the resident said.
“But the Rongcheng plant is a big taxpayer, so the government is supporting it … everyone with any money, senior management and officials, have all left town,” he said.
“The only people left here are farmers, and we can’t leave here. Where would we get the money to buy a place to live?”
Repeated complaints
A protester surnamed Zhang said the Rongcheng plant had had a severe impact on the local environment, but that nothing had been done in spite of repeated complaints from local people.
“There has been a lot of smoke emitted recently that smells very strongly of gas, and it has made local people very angry,” Zhang said.
