{"id":47310,"date":"2015-05-27T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=47310 "},"modified":"2015-05-27T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T22:15:00","slug":"47310-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=47310","title":{"rendered":"Thousands Protest High Cancer Rates Linked to Pollution in China\\’s Tianjin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2015-05-27<\/div>
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Residents of Tianjin’s Gegu township march to protest pollution from local steel factory, May 26, 2015.<\/div>
Photo courtesy of an RFA listener<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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“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.”<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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“We want to live, and yet our children and grandchildren have been affected by pollution,” he said.<\/div>
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‘Poisonous smell’<\/div>
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“There is pollution in the air and pollution in the ground … The iron and steel plant is too close to our homes,” Xue said.<\/div>
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“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.”<\/div>
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He said he had been told the figure by doctors at the Tianjin Tumor Hospital, one of the leading cancer hospitals in China.<\/div>
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“We all go there for treatment, and there is a particular tumor that they say comes from [Gegu],” Xue said.<\/div>
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Another Gegu resident, who declined to be named, said the plant had been in operation for more than 20 years.<\/div>
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“Every household has somebody in it who has cancer now,” the resident said.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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“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?”<\/div>
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Repeated complaints<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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For detail please visit here<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>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.<\/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-47310","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\/47310","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=47310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}