By staff reporter Duan Hongqing

At one o’clock in the morning on August 18, more than 50 peasants from Fujian Province’s Pingnan County rented a car to go to the Fujian Provincial High People’s Court. They squatted outside the court’s door until dawn for the hearing of the second instance in an environmental lawsuit, which was going to be held at 8:30 am.

Backing this group of 50 are another 1721 peasants who have spent the past 13 years working hard to oppose a local chemical factory that is a great source of pollution.

This is the largest class-action environmental lawsuit in the world to date, and it was listed as one of “China’s Ten Biggest Environmental Lawsuits” in 2003 by the State Environmental Protection Administration.

It has also been a marathon case. The peasants began their indictment in November of 2002, and three years later, in April of 2005, the Ningde City Intermediate People’s Court delivered the sentence of the first instance. Both plaintiffs and the defendant appealed the decision and Fujian Provincial Advanced People’s Court put it on record for the second instance. By September 3, when this report was finished, the case had not yet received its final judgment.

Economic Development and PollutionPingnan County is in the north of Fujian Province, and lies in the middle of Jiu Mountain, 830 meters above the sea level. Forests cover as much as 76.2 percent of the entire county, and the county is the only natural reserve for mandarin ducks and macaques in the world.

Zhang Changjian, a 45-year-old village doctor in Pingnan County’s Xiping Village, told a Caijing reporter that the green bamboo and clear brook were an inerasable part in his memory. However, the area is out of the way and economically undeveloped, and it did not even have paved roads until 1994.

In 1992, under the “developed areas help poor areas” policy, the Fuzhou No.1 Chemical Factory decided to relocate its potassium chlorate product line to Pingnan County. In March of the same year, Rongping Pool Chemical Factory, the biggest chlorate factory in Asia, broke ground. The Fuzhou No.1 Chemical Factory took up 70 percent of the investment, and the remaining 30 percent was provided by the Pingnan County government. On December 28, 1993, trial production succeeded; on January 28, 1994, the whole product line began working.

Soon, one third of Nanping County’s fiscal revenue came from the Rongping Chemical Factory. However, along with economic development, environmental pollution also appeared. Zhang Changjian’s house was less than 200 meters away from the factory, and he felt that the air quality was becoming worse and worse. Bamboo, fruit trees and flowers around the factory died, and the fish and shrimp in the lower reaches of the nearby river gradually disappeared. As village doctor, Zhang Changjian found that his number of patients was slowly increasing. Villagers often suffered from headaches, illness, tightness of chest and itchy skin. More alarming was that many more people were being diagnosed with cancer. According to the Xiping villagers, from 1990 to 1994, only one villager died of cancer; from 1995 to 1998, the total was 4, and the number climbed to 17 from 1999 to 2001. From the second year of the chemical plant’s production in 1995 to 2004, not even one youth of conscription age passed their physical exam to join the army.

Villagers collected wastewater and residue discharged by the factory and sent them to related departments for tests, and the results showed that the pollutants contained in them were severely over the standard limits. The presence of chromium was found to be ten times over the common figure. Environmentalists explained that chromium could cause diarrhea and skin hyper susceptibility, and erode people’s respiratory organs causing rhinitis, pharyngitis and bronchitis. Chromium can also cause cancer.

The Long Road of LawFinally, villagers took up the arm of law to protect their interests. On November 7, 2002, 1643 Pingnan County villagers from Xiping, Houlong and Xiadi villages formally prosecuted Rongping Chemical Factory for environmental pollution in the Fujian Ningde Intermediate People’s Court. Later, another 97 villagers applied to be plaintiffs of the case. Among the 1643 plaintiffs, 10 quit, 9 passed away, and, in the end, 1721 villagers participated in the lawsuit as plaintiffs. Zhang Changjian and four other villagers were representatives of the plaintiffs.

After two year’s wait, on January 24, 2005, Ningde Intermediate People’s Court met to hear the case.

As plaintiffs, the villagers requested that the factory stop the infraction immediately and clean up the residual waste in and around the factory. They also asked for 10.33 million yuan (US＄ 1.27 million) in compensation for their loss of damaged crops, bamboo and trees, as well as a 3.20 million yuan (US＄ 394.58 thousand) compensation for emotional damage. The total requested compensation was 13.53 million yuan (US＄ 1.67 million).

In its own defense, the accused party insisted that the factory maintained complete and advanced environmental protection establishments, and that its disposal of waste materials completely fit the national standard, having no pollution problems; if there were indeed pollution instances, they must have been caused by other sources. On April 15, the court handed down its decision, confirming that the chemical factory caused environmental pollution. The factory would have to stop the infraction immediately and compensate the villagers for their loss of trees, fruits, bamboo and farmland with 249.76 thousand yuan (US＄ 28.13 thousand).

After receiving the sentence, both plaintiffs and defendant appealed the decision to the higher Fujian Advanced People’s Court.

A Sad AffairAs early as 2002, Pollution Victims Law Aid Center of the China University of Political Science and Law involved itself in the case providing legal aid for the local villagers. When talking about why the case was prolonged, the center chief Wang Huanfa pointed out: “the crux lies in the local government.” According to his work experience, most enterprises that cause pollution are big taxpayers, and therefore some local governments have predilections toward them. Besides, local environmental protection departments usually act according to local governments, which also makes environmental problems difficult to solve.

Wang once organized a group of environmental experts and reporters from Beijing to pay a visit to Fujian and found out that the factory’s environmental protection facilities were really extremely advanced. However, they were almost never used because of the high costs it took to run them.

In 2003, CCTV reporters of “News Investigation” went to Pingnan and made a program about the factory’s pollution. When the program was broadcast, Pingnan County actually had an “accidental power cut” that made the program unavailable for people there. The question is: which is more important, the factory that provides one third of the county’s fiscal revenue or the interests of more than 1700 villages? The local government’s action answered that very well.

(US＄ 1=8.11 yuan)