CHINA.Demonstrators obtain the cessation of a polluting project

For the second time in a month, a polluting industrial project has been permanently halted in China after a demonstration during which the local government headquarters in Qidong, near Shanghai, was ransacked by protesters who clashed with the police.

Early in the morning, thousands of people gathered to protest against a pipeline carrying wastewater to their seaside town from a paper mill of the Japanese group Oji Paper Group, far from a hundred kilometers.

Large numbers of protesters invaded the local government building in the courtyard of which two cars were overturned.

The crowd was estimated at "several thousand" by the New China agency, while a demonstrator interviewed by AFP spoke of 50,000 protesters.

At government headquarters, demonstrators seized bottles of liquor and wine as well as cartons of cigarettes, items commonly received as bribes in China by officials.

Some of the items were displayed outside the government building, according to a photo posted on Sina Weibo, China's leading microblogging service with more than 250 million subscribers and on which the search term "Qidong" was quickly censored on Saturday.

The courtyard of the seat of government and the balconies overlooking this courtyard were black with people, according to other shots.

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In two photos, a man identified by netizens as the city's Party secretary, Sun Jianhua, appears surrounded by police, his torso stripped despite having had his clothes ripped off, then escorted by security forces. order.

In the middle of the morning, violent clashes pitted demonstrators against police officers who came in large numbers, AFP noted.

At the same time, the authorities announced that the dumping of waste water from the paper mill, which had already been temporarily suspended, would be permanently suspended.

“Nantong Municipality (where the paper mill is located) has decided to permanently abandon the plan to discharge sewage into the sea: we ask residents to return to their homes,” the police said on their microblog .

Despite this announcement, also broadcast by local television, several demonstrators interviewed by telephone by AFP remained skeptical about the real intentions of the authorities, while the crowd began to disperse.

Discharges would have reached 150,000 tons of wastewater per day when the plant, whose construction began in 2007, would have operated at full capacity, according to residents quoted by the state daily Global Times on Friday.

"We do not discharge polluted water. The water we discharge has been purified and complies with local environmental protection standards," assured a public relations officer. of Oji Paper, quoted by the Japanese agency Jiji Press.

Protest movements against the degradation of the environment, victim of three decades of forced industrialization, have multiplied since last year in China.

At the beginning of July in Shifang in the province of Sichuan (southwest), demonstrators had clashed for several days with the police before obtaining assurances of the definitive abandonment of a factory project polluting metallurgy.

During the summer of 2011, a factory manufacturing solar panels was temporarily closed in Haining (east) after demonstrations, while the inhabitants of Dalian (north-east) had obtained the move of a petrochemical complex which was to be located in their city.