Anger in China Rises Over Threat to Environment
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Correction Appended
XINCHANG, China, July 18 - After three nights of increasingly heavy rioting, the police were taking no chances on Monday, deploying dozens of busloads of officers before dusk and blocking every road leading to the factory.
But the angry residents in this village 180 miles south of Shanghai had learned their lessons, too, they said, having studied reports of riots in towns near and far that have swept rural China in recent months. Sneaking over mountain paths and wading through rice paddies, they made their way to a pharmaceuticals plant, they said, determined to pursue a showdown over the environmental threat they say it poses.
As many as 15,000 people massed here Sunday night and waged a pitched battle with the authorities, overturning police cars and throwing stones for hours, undeterred by thick clouds of tear gas. Fewer people may have turned out Monday evening under rainy skies, but residents of this factory town in the wealthy Zhejiang Province vow they will keep demonstrating until they have forced the 10-year-old plant to relocate.
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Three protesters, in plain clothes at bottom left nearest the camera, were arrested in Xinchang, near Shanghai, outside a pharmaceutical factory that they say is polluting their village's water.
Protesters, who say the pharmaceuticals factory at Xinchang pollutes their water, were blocked on Monday by police barricades. There is rising discontent in China with the authorities' failure to respond to grievances.