XIPING: On the morning of July 2, 2008, Chen Jianhong, a staff with the Ningde Intermediate People’s Court, finally set foot on this poverty-struck mountainous village, brought to global attention by an environmental lawsuit that involved the most number of plaintiffs anywhere in the world.

The 1,721 local peasants who led unremitting struggles and won against the polluting Rongping Joint Chemical Plant, Asia’s largest chlorate producer, were awarded 684,178.2 yuan (about US$100,000) by Chen’s court in November 2005.

Since the money was a mere 5 percent of the plaintiffs’ claimed sum, their victory was all but symbolic: with expenditures deducted, each of the farmers involved would get only less than 200 yuan (US$29), the cost of two round trips between their village and Fuzhou, the provincial capital.

But still, the compensation was not paid to five villager representatives until September last year, and until Chen’s arrival in Rongping, the polluting firm was not even officially notified of the court fees – worth some 116,000 yuan (US$17,000) – it needed to give back to the farmers.

An official in charge of the Ningde court, who refused to be named, told China Daily the three-year delay resulted from understaffing in face of other “big cases”, and that their inspectors had each been applying for an updated official license, which must be renewed every five years.

“We only received the renewed licenses on July 1, and then immediately sent Chen to Rongping,” the official said. “Our staff had no legal authority without it.”

As news of Chen’s arrival spread around town, village doctor Zhang Changjian, who has been leader of the plaintiffs since they filed the lawsuit in 2002, patiently awaited in his home just 500 meters away from the factory.

State regulations say that heavily toxic chemical firms must be located at least one km away from any residential zone. But in here, the Rongping factory has seated much closer to many a villager’s homes since 1994. Hundreds were forced away in the following years, but the poorest peasants, who have nowhere else to go, stayed.

Zhang is expecting the court fees, so that he and the other representatives could allocate the US$100,000 compensation, which they put in a bank, in conjunction to the villagers.

“That will bring a full period to our present case,” he said in a slack tone, smiling. “And it will better prepare us for the coming one.”

The 2002 case and what has changed

Zhang and the villagers’ decade-long struggle and hard-fought victory have been widely reported. China’s central media, such as Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV), Legal Daily and Workers’ Daily, each ran comprehensive coverage of the event. Wall Street Journal’s article on the incident, meanwhile, won last year’s Pulitzer Prize.

At the government level, then-Premier Zhu Rongji personally replied to the villagers in 2002. China’s top environmental watchdog, on the other hand, named Rongping among the 55 worst polluting enterprises in the country in 2002. The next summer, it further listed the case as one of China’s top ten environmental lawsuits of the year.

The current administration has not made explicit reference to this or other similar cases, which had been on the rise in some regions. But a first-ever State Council meeting on rural environmental protection last week did specify that the issue is vital and must be assigned “an important tactical position”.

Vice-Premier Li Keqiang stressed that environmental protection in China’s rural areas, with improved water quality and pesticide pollution prevention as the main focus for the next two years, contributes greatly to the country’s sustainable development.

The State Council hopes the rural environment to “greatly improve” by 2015. And to do so, eliminating the menace of polluting firms is a basic prerequisite, especially – perhaps even foremost – in places like Rongping, a remote, scarcely populated area of Pingnan County in the southeastern Fujian province.

The county and the factory

Pingnan, a stunning but poor mountainous county of roughly 1,500 sq km three hours’ drive away from Fuzhou, is home to 180,000 residents, 80 percent of whom are peasants living on forest, fruits, bamboos and rice. In the local dialect, “ping” and “nan” are homophonous with the characters for “poor” and “difficult”, which local residents often refer to as vivid reflections of their real-life situations.

In the mid-1990s, when industrial development expanded everywhere across the country, it did the same in here, creating hungry moneymakers as well as big-shot polluters, claiming to play a starring role in leading the local public out of poverty.

Rongping is a classic example. Originally set up in Fuzhou in 1958 as part of the state-owned Fuzhou No.1 Chemical Factory, it was relocated here in December 1993 in both a poverty alleviation program for the county, and an ambitious effort to expand production in making use of Pingnan’s hydroelectric sources.

The Fuzhou firm held a 70 percent stake in the chemical plant while the Pingnan government controlled the rest until 2002, when Rongping was fully privatized and sold to Indonesian Chinese businessman Lin Qianghua, its current sole owner.

The plant’s phase I project, which produced 15,000 tons of potassium chlorate, began immediately upon arrival here. A second phase that produced 20,000 tons of sodium chlorate was launched in 1999.

Even in the aftermath of the case, Rongping still produces 45,000 tons of both annually, half of which are exported to Taiwan as well as countries such as Japan, Thailand and Canada. It also pays a fifth of Pingnan’s taxes, while employing some 350 workers, mostly from nearby villages.

The pollution

Money aside, the Rongping plant was spilling a high amount of chromium-6 into the river and spewing chorine from its smokestacks. Factory managers and officials with Pingnan’s environmental protection, health and forestry bureaus all confirmed in face-to-face interviews with China Daily that the plant’s sewage “greatly exceeded” the national standards for chromium-6 in chemical production.

“Environmental protection measures were not up to standard when phase II began,” explained Rongping deputy general manager Zhuo Nan. “Our employees were untrained, and management was loose.”

Breathing chromium-6, a routine for even county officials who work just one km away from the factory, is known to be associated with lung cancer and other health problems.

The villagers

Local residents began to feel the pain not long after the factory opened. But in the first few years, complaints were directed toward individual loss of bamboo shoots planted near Rongping and withered or died. “We were too naïve,” villager Song Linsong recalled. “The factory gave us some money, and we thought that was it.”

By 1999, Zhang, a barefoot doctor since 1983, noticed that things had escalated. Through reviewing handwritten notes and local medical records on his computer, he observed a clear rise in the number of cancer cases, skin rashes, stomach illnesses and breathing-related symptoms.

Suspecting their links with Rongping’s pollution, Zhang and a number of fellow peasants began petitioning to the local government. When that failed, they sought help from yet higher administrative bodies – the city, the provincial and the central.

By 2001, when Zhang’s voice reached the national capital, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) informed him to file a formal complaint. After he did, a reporter with a Beijing-based magazine under the Supreme People’s Procuratorate traveled to Pingnan for field research in January 2002, and wrote a lengthy story on Rongping and the villagers who were affected by it.

That was the first report to reveal the scale of the plant’s pollution. Until then, Rongping had been rated a “model environmental protection company” locally each year.

The news exposure came somewhat late, Song said, because by the time national press turned their eyes to Xiping, the environment here had worsened to the extent that the impact of pollution was “too visible”. A cow that drank water from a ditch outside the Rongping gate fell and died after it walked for only 200 m, he said.

But the coverage proved crucial. In 2002, Xiping became a center of national attention. Premier Zhu Rongji responded to the villagers in an email saying that the top officials had taken note of their situation, and SEPA rated Rongping as one of China’s 55 worst polluters. Both gave the much-needed confidence to local peasants, who under Zhang filed a lawsuit to the Ningde court in November that year. The number of plaintiffs was 1,643 in the beginning, and eventually rose to 1,721.

What has changed

The villagers won three years later, in what locals say will go down as a most important and difficult environmental lawsuit in China. But villagers are now too exhausted, while government officials and Rongping leaders are too cautious to look back on the legal proceedings in great detail.

Zhang, who had his clinic forced to shut down during the lawsuit and now lives mainly on borrowed money, is focusing on what has remained unchanged instead of the case itself. “On the whole, things are getting better,” he said with a wee smile.

Liu Xianbin, another leading plaintiff, agreed. In April 2003, when News Probe, China’s most popular TV program’s coverage of the case was on air on CCTV, power was shut in all of Pingnan so that its residents would not be able to watch it.

“That won’t happen now,” Liu said. The villagers were also not allowed into Rongping before the case; those who tried were either arrested or bullied. Today, local residents are free to enter the site and talk or complain to factory managers.

“No one is born to know everything, and you can’t look at things statically,” said county chief Wu Yirong, who came to Pingnan in 2006. “The incident boosted our environmental awareness and is still a reminder. What has been done could show you.”

And what has been done, according to plant executive deputy head He Zhong, is in the numbers. Some 9 million yuan (US$1.31 million) worth of environment protection facilities, including upgraded wastewater treatment equipments, a solid waste landfill and a real-time system that monitors the portion of chromium-6 in the local water, have been built between 2003 and now.

“We’re the best among all of China’s chlorate producers in this effort,” he said.

Atop the hill behind his factory sits Xinlei, a company that produces manmade crystals worth millions of yuan per year. Its chief Niu Tianlan said it “purifies the harmful hydrogen dispersed by Rongping, and uses it as a core component” in making its own products. “I’d be most upset if pollution here were that bad. But I’ve been neighboring the factory since 2001, and feel stronger than ever before,” the 70-year-old said.

His effort will complement Rongping’s next big plan, a 220 million yuan (US$32 million) provincially backed project aimed at using its waste hydrogen to make hydrogen peroxide.

“This reflects a shift in our vision of development,” said deputy county chief Zhang Liangzhu, referring to Pingnan’s official goal since 2003: “We want not only mountains of gold and silver, but more importantly, verdant mountains and green waters.”

Aside from damaging crops, chlorine causes bamboos to shrivel and die, Zhou Daihui, Pingnan’s deputy chief of forestry bureau, said. “We haven’t seen that for the past two to three years… the mountains are green again.”

A brief tour to the plant’s nearby hills and fields would leave precisely such an impression. Under the glaring sun of summer, trees and flowers appeared to be flourishing luxuriantly.

What hasn’t changed

Only closer inspection would reveal that under the broad shade of green, disturbing dark marks and yellow spots filled up the leaves, mostly wrinkled. Uphill, dying or dead bamboos, already dried or otherwise turned brownish, lined parallel to Rongping’s smokestacks standing tall afar.

“Those who inspect from a distance don’t see the difference,” said local peasant Song Lingui. “But when you come down, see it from here, touch it and feel it, you’ll immediately know what’s happening.”

Villagers planted bamboos twice again this year, but none of them survived. They insisted that it is due to the ongoing pollution from Rongping, which secretly disperses chlorine and wastewater after midnight. One latest such operation in late June had left many living within a 2 km radius of the plant feeling unwell, Zhang said.

The county’s agriculture inspectors, meanwhile, attributed the misfortune to the blazing sun and possible pests, and factory managers denied any illegal pollution since the case. A sample of the leaves has been collected and will be sent to the new Department of Environmental Protection for examination.

Despite recent antipollution efforts, which local residents say do relate to an improved environment from the past few years, villagers stress that their situation remains essentially unchanged, as the plant has continued full operations and is pursuing another expansion while putting on a show in environmental work.

Rongping’s real-time monitoring system, Zhang said, is not built around its major disperse channel of chromium-6 and thus fundamentally useless. He also argued that its cooperation with Xinlei in using waste hydrogen is “a hoax”, because hydrogen is much less harmful to the human body than chromium-6 and chlorine, not to mention that Niu’s factory releases additional waste in the process.

“The hydrogen peroxide project is even more worrisome as it will produce exactly the same waste, and in a much greater amount,” the 48-year-old said. Hydrogen peroxide ranks first in the oxidizer category of China’s list of hazardous chemicals. Sodium chlorate and potassium chlorate are 30^th and 31^st, respectively, on the list.

The villagers’ health is at the true heart of the matter, the doctor said. Nobody except the Xiping villagers themselves, who are too poor to buy alternatives or relocate and too weak to work away from home, eat what they grow. And their produce, the shriveled, crumpled and greasy cabbages, other vegetables and fruits, have long been singled out as undesirable in markets elsewhere.

“This has been our daily food. For the time being we’re okay,” said Song Lingui. “But who knows what might happen next?”

Ultimately, villagers say the solution lies in Rongping’s relocation. “We’ll become rich as soon as it moves. Too many working-age labors here were forced to move, causing an economic disaster for us besides polluting the environment,” said Song Linsong.

And yet deep down, Zhang knows that relocation may never take place. A 2003 SEPA notice explicitly stated: “existing chromium compound producers in environmentally-sensitive areas must not expand its scale of production, and should gradually relocate”. But on the contrary, the Rongping plant is expanding its area further into the villagers’ land. Dozens of houses around the factory gate were recently dismantled to pave way for a third phase of its project, which factory managers say already received approval.

During last week’s State Council meeting, Li Keqiang asked the government to make greater efforts to tackle environmental problems that threaten public health and food safety. Pingnan officials have vowed to do just that. But for many Rongping villagers, lawsuit is still seen as the most effective approach.

“The day they begin phase III is the day we file the next lawsuit,” Zhang said. “We might not have more than 1,000 plaintiffs again this time, but we won’t be alone.”

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（新华社北京７月１日电）