Hundreds of villagers in eastern China riot against polluting factory (battery factories)
I am not sure if Jianxia is part of Meishan county or its neighbor. Chinese regime must be really slow to react to the situation.
As for Chinese income distribution, some Chinese expert says that it has 'inverse T' shape, that is, most people are at the rock bottom while precious few are in the higher bracket.
Ping!
let's see... china seems happy to jump on the green wagon for minute amounts of hazardous substances in electronic components, but doesn't give a tinkers dam about gross pollution from a battery factory. figures.
This is one of the great unreported stories. China's economy has been on a tear for nearly a decade. Lots and lots of cheap manufacturing of products sold abroad. Besides a billion people and cheap labor, one of the reasons for cheap production costs is because they take sludge, heavy metals, and all sorts of industrial waste and byproducts and simply throw it in the back yard. That is unsustainable. They are destroying their land - rivers, lakes, waterways, soil, for short term gain.
Well, duh - they burned it down!
I think this is part of the natural evolutiopn of a country with growing industrialization. It's happened in other countries, too. Companies in the U.S., sick of high costs and governelnt health and saefty regulations set up shop in another country without such beaurocratic regulations. Pollution and poor working conditions get worse and worse in the new country. The residents and employees start to resist such company policies and loose government regulations and the country introduces health and safety regulations and mandates pollution controls. That's how the regualtions came into existence in the U.S. It has now happened in Mexico where American companies thought they could function with little concern for the environment due to lac of regulation. Mexico got first hadn experience what lack of regulation caused and now Mexico is created strict regulations. CHina is now at the beginning of this process. In a few decades, companies may actually relocate to the U.S. because our regulations may actually be less retrictive than the newer regulations comming into effect in some third world countries.