{"id":35486,"date":"2013-08-29T23:53:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T23:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=35486 "},"modified":"2013-08-29T23:53:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T23:53:00","slug":"35486-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=35486","title":{"rendered":"Crowd Protests Planned Incinerator in China\\’s Guangdong Province"},"content":{"rendered":"
2013-08-29<\/div>
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Protesters were injured in clashes with police during a demonstration over the planned waste incinerator plant in Huadu, Guangdong on July 19, 2013.<\/div>
Photo courtesy of a protester<\/div>
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Hundreds of people demonstrated outside government buildings in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Thursday over plans to build a waste-incineration plant on their doorstep, residents said.<\/div>
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The protesters hung banners outside government headquarters in Guangdong’s Puzhai township, which read “Boycott the garbage incinerator power plant!” “Say no to cancer!” and “Protect the health of future generations!”.<\/div>
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The protest is the latest in a string of similar demonstrations in Guangdong against waste incineration power generators, which earn huge sums in government subsidies for every ton of garbage burned.<\/div>
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“[It went on for] one or two hours,” a Puzhai resident surnamed Chen said in an interview after the demonstration dispersed peacefully.<\/div>
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He said feelings were running high against the plant in Puzhai, where people fear their health will be ruined by pollution.<\/div>
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“This most certainly cannot be built,” Chen said. “All my family, all my relatives, went [to protest].”<\/div>
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‘Everyone very worried’<\/div>
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Plans for the waste incineration plant first became known on July 19, after they had progressed as far as the contract-signing stage without local people finding out, according to a post from user @1988niankaishiweile on Monday.<\/div>
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A second Puzhai resident said the government had gone ahead with its plans without any public consultation.<\/div>
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“If they are going to build it here, then they should seek the opinions of local people,” said the resident, who declined to give his name.<\/div>
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“Everyone living nearby is very worried about it.”<\/div>
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He said local people had first heard about the plans in early August after activists took steps to alert the public about the planned incinerator.<\/div>
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“Some of them were handing out leaflets to all of us around here,” the Puzhai resident said. “Ordinary people like us don’t get to see [official documents], not even if they are made public.”<\/div>
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Growing middle-class movement<\/div>
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Three decades of breakneck economic growth have left Guangdong with a seriously degraded environment, causing a fast-maturing environmental movement to emerge among the region’s middle class.<\/div>
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Previous attempts to build similar plants elsewhere in the province have drawn widespread criticism over local government access to the huge potential profits linked to waste disposal projects.<\/div>
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Guangdong authorities last month detained a large number of people who had called for the cancellation of a controversial waste incinerator in Shiling township in the provincial capital Guangzhou’s outlying Huadu district.<\/div>
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They had planned to stage a mass march to government offices on July 23 to voice their opposition to the waste project, four days after a 30,000-strong protest led to bloody clashes with the police.<\/div>
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In 2009, during a similar protest in Panyu, local residents said that incinerators could earn 140 yuan (U.S. $20) in government subsidies for every ton of trash burned, which could amount to 480,000 yuan (U.S. $70,000) per day, or 173 million yuan (U.S. $25 million) each year.<\/div>
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Local residents fear the plants will endanger their health and the environment, while officials say Guangdong has to find some way to dispose of mountains of garbage.<\/div>
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Ordinary Chinese people are becoming increasingly active in support of environmental issues in recent years, putting pressure on local governments to implement the country’s comprehensive environmental protection laws.<\/div>
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Reported by Yang Fan for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>the<\/span><\/a> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>original article<\/a><\/a><\/a>.<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/strong>
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<div>The protesters hung banners outside government headquarters in Guangdong's Puzhai township, which read "Boycott the garbage incinerator power plant!" "Say no to cancer!" and "Protect the health of future generations!".<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}