Chinese villagers occupy and close Zhuxi Chemical Park, Dongyang County, Zhejiang, 2001-2005

The town of Huashui, in Dongyang County, Zhejiang Province lies in eastern China. The town is known for plastic recycling, and is divided into 18 “administrative villages” that then have “natural villages” within them. Dongyang County opened the Zhuxi Chemical Industrial Park in early 2001, on land from the Huaxi and Huangshan villages, and announced that the first factory to move there would be a relocated pesticide factory. Villagers became angry because of the way the company had abused land regulations in its construction of the factory, and forced the county to close eleven of the thirteen factories built in the park after a four year campaign.

The Dongnong Company began construction on the first factory in October of 2001. Soon after, the Party secretary of the Huaxi No. 5 village anonymously wrote and distributed a leaflet called “A portrait of Dongnong Company,” which described the harmful environmental impacts the pesticide factory would have on the surrounding land. The Party secretary distributed the leaflet to 150 influential villagers, who received it on 17 October 2001. The villagers quickly began to reprint and distribute the leaflet themselves, pasting 1,000 copies over village walls. Part of the reason “The portrait” leaflet proved so effective was because it talked about how the destruction of the land by the factories might harm the villager’s offspring and threaten cultural values focused on lineage. Other villagers started a door-to-door campaign and gathered more than 600 signatures asking the village for a referendum to remove and relocate the company. The petition further requested that the company be held responsible for any environmental damages, and to provide safe drinking water and medical check-ups to villagers. As villagers became increasingly angry, they also started to question local officials, particularly Party Secretary Xu of Huaxi Town, about the true environmental impacts of the Chemical Park. Each time the residents asked, the local officials gave them dismissive and unsatisfying answers. 

Villagers then took more direct action, with dozens of villagers confronting Secretary Xu on 20 October 2001 at a restaurant, where he was dining with his associates. The villagers demanded another dialogue on the environmental issue, but again they met with unhelpful responses. They began to yell at the secretary as he was dining. Some of these villagers then dragged Xu to the industrial park and forced him to walk around the park in bare feet and smell the wastewater of two factories. Xu was rescued by village cadres and taken to a hospital, but remaining villagers destroyed the fence of the Dongnong Company, and broke windows and doors of two other factories. Cadres are full-time revolutionaries that are dedicated to the goals of the communist party. After the kidnapping, some villagers also vandalized property and stole computers or telephones. This group of villagers was not officially organized, and represented a much smaller group of villagers than the vast majority of protests organized for this campaign.

Dongyang County prosecuted twelve villagers for disturbing the social order and jailed them for between one and three years. The Party secretary of Huaxi No. 5 village was not present at the 20 October incident, but he served the longest time behind bars for his role in writing and distributing “The portrait” leaflet. After these arrests, many villagers remained inactive for a few years. 

China passed a new environmental protection law, called the Environmental Impact Assessment Law, on 28 October 2002, just a year after the incident during which villagers forced Xu to walk barefoot around the industrial park. A subsequent publicity campaign by the State Environmental Protection Agency promoted enforcement of the law. However, most of the villagers then began filing land-based complaints against the factory. They charged that it was built on land that was “illegally or semi-illegally seized,” as was noted by the Huashui town party secretary.  

Rainfall on 2 July 2003 washed chemicals from the Park into rice fields, turning the green fields yellow. In response to this, some villagers pursued environmental claims through the local government, asking for redress for land-related grievances and seeking to prove the correlation between pollution and health.

The next large action did not come until after 16 April 2004, when Zhejiang Province officials published a public notice in the Zhejiang Daily newspaper that said certain developmental zones needed to be cleaned up, including the Zhuxi Chemical Park. On 26 July 2004, Dongyang County followed the lead of the provincial government and issued fourteen similar documents stating that the factories in the Park needed to return any stolen land to the villagers. 

The villagers used these documents to claim the right to push factories off their land. They then wrote a letter to the Huashui town government declaring that they would organize to move the factories off their land, and if they were not successful, they expected the local government to assist them in expelling the factories.

Inspired by these statements from local and provincial governments, a group of three activists, who had been imprisoned in 2001, attempted to hire a Beijing law firm to sue the polluters and Dongyang County for not doing more to remove the factory. However, they needed 500,000 yuan to cover the legal costs, and so they turned to the Society of Senior Citizens (SSC) for Huaxi No. 5 village to help them fundraise for the legal aid. Although the fundraising was unsuccessful, the Huaxi No. 5 village SSC succeeded in raising thousands of yuan. The protestors then switched strategies to petitioning local and provincial governments. SSC members and one of the imprisoned activists from 2001 went to both the prefecture and provincial capitals multiple times to submit petitions; they even traveled to Beijing to ask the Center to look into the pollution and to identify ways that villagers could get their land back. 

Meanwhile, SSC members advocated for increased oversight of the factories by Huashui Town and Dongyang County to ensure they were not violating any environmental protection laws. One particularly motivated villager collected signatures for petitions and sent hundreds of petitions to local, provincial, and federal officials. The Huaxi No. 5 SSC remained active during the petition drives, holding meetings every day to discuss the environmental impacts of the Park and what to do about it. In the end, the petitions failed to convince any levels of government to meet the demands of petitioners .

After many failed attempts using less-confrontational tactics, on 24 March 2005, residents of Huaxi No. 5 village set up a large tent at the front entrance of the park and started a constant vigil. These villagers were largely supported by the No. 5 SSC, who helped coordinate schedules for people to take shifts in the tent,ensured everyone was cared for while maintaining the vigil (even raising money to pay people to stay nights), and encouraged other seniors and people from surrounding villages to join the encampment. Within a few days, villagers from over 10 surrounding villages had joined, with each village erecting their own tent as they came. The goal in the early days of the encampment was to demonstrate their frustration and commitment by maintaining the vigil. Leaders of the encampment instructed people not to engage with any of the authorities or factory workers.  

Authorities tried to take the encampment down three times, only for the villagers to put it back up again and attract even more participants. When the county deployed a team of sixty “thought workers” to attempt to convince the protestors to give up their posts, the villagers came out of their tents to pressure the team that was trying to demobilize them. The protestors insulted the workers by calling them traitors and attempted to get them to stop their work. Police would be surrounded, with people pulling at their clothes and arms, making it extremely difficult for them to announce new policies. The protestors also began to make speeches in front of groups of villagers at the encampment, stating that they would not leave until the county promised to stop the pollution and set a shut-down date.  

Authorities began to intensify their “thought work,” and protestors responded by escalating their tactics as well. Part of these escalations included theatrical ritual actions, such as elderly protestors donning white mourning robes and hats, lighting incense, and kowtowing. It is often seen as a sign that your life will be shortened if elderly people kowtow to you, but the elders insisted that they were begging to be saved.

The size of the encampment continued to grow throughout these exchanges between protestors and authorities. By 6 April, protestors had erected eighteen tents, and town and county officials began to feel pressure. Concerned that the encampment would draw international media attention, the county party secretary ordered that no new tents were to be built. Yet, the organizers continued to expand the encampment to around twenty-four tents. County officials soon decided to take a more direct approach.

At 3:00 a.m. on 10 April 2005, county leaders sent over 1,500 (although some estimates say closer to 3,000) local cadres and security personnel to end the encampment. Protestors at the encampment consisted of mainly senior citizens, but as the news of police presence spread an estimated 20,000 people made their way to the site. As the cadres and security began their attempt to clear out protestors, violence broke out between protestors and the police. It is unclear exactly how the violence began, but over 100 police officers and 200 villagers were injured, and 68 government vehicles were damaged. International media attention adopted the view that the authorities’ repression was heavy handed, especially as most of the protesting body was elderly citizens. Once the police had gone, these elder protestors gathered the evidence of repression and used it to decorate the encampment site. Protestors hung tents with police uniforms, batons, and shields. After 10 April, the protestors shifted to using more aggressive tactics like denouncing local leaders, carrying out more mock funerals, and interrogating factory owners. One poster called the county party secretary, who had approved the sending of police on 10 April, a “slaughterer of the masses,” and even held a mock funeral for him. On 5 May, an urn with a picture of him with burning incense was set up, attracting over 10,000 spectators. 

The 10 April incident began to attract many spectators, including observers from the national government in Beijing, as well as international press. On 19 April 2005, Dongyang County had a special meeting to discuss the environmental protection issues in the Zhuxi Chemical Park, where they accepted the proposed protection program. Although it was not disclosed at the time, they agreed to close eleven of the thirteen factories in the park. On 20 May 2005 the protestors took down the encampment. For the two factories that remained standing, they continued to be watched closely by the now very well-resourced Huashi SSCs. The SSCs began to play a much larger role in village politics, having influence over elections and development plans.