ENVIRONMENT

In August 2009, the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper owned and operated by the state-run Xinhua news agency, released a series of hard-hitting reports investigating the unusually high rate of lead poisoning among children in the city of Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province. The story, written by Xinhua reporters Chen Gang and Liu Tonglian, revealed that 84% of the children tested in the contaminated area had excessive levels of lead in their blood and exposed the nearby Dongling Metal Smelting plant for polluting the villages’ air and water.

In November 2006, the local government announced it would build a new chemical plant producing toxic compounds just 7 km away from Xiamen City, with a population of over 2.2 million. This story, published in Hong Kong’s Phoenix Weekly in May 2007, is the first news article about the issue and uses public records as well as interviews to show how authorities approved the project despite known health and environmental risks. 

After the story was published, authorities quickly removed the edition of Phoenix Weekly from shelves in Xiamen, though the article continued to circulate online. Xiamen residents staged a protest, forcing the local government to move the plant inland to another less populated part of Fujian province. The Xiamen case was the first in a series of large-scale movements against chemical plants across China.