For Chinese, Peasant Revolt Is Rare Victory

It was not for lack of trying. Huaxi officials, including Party Secretary Wang Wei, visited other factories in the region and warned in a confidential report that pollution was a danger to residents and agriculture. A copy of the report was leaked and posted for all to see. Partly as a result, villagers wrote an open letter to the Dongyang municipal government demanding the industrial park be closed.

"The Dongyang government turned a deaf ear to it all," said one of those involved.

Frustrated, the villagers tried higher up the hierarchy. They sent a delegation to Zhejiang provincial headquarters in Hangzhou and to the national capital, Beijing, where they left petitions with the premier's office and the State Environmental Protection Administration. No one stopped to listen, they said.

Their patience exhausted, a group of farmers broke into the park in October 2001, shattering windows and vandalizing machinery at the pesticide factory. Wang and 11 others were subsequently arrested. Ten of the 12 were sentenced to jail terms for disturbing the public order. At the trial, according to one of those sentenced, the judge said he did not want to hear about Huaxi's problems with pollution.

A Strategy to Resist

The villagers resisted for the next four years, but made little progress. Finally, they built their first two protest tents at the industrial park's entrance on March 23, using red, white and blue nylon tarps stretched over bamboo frames. Some villagers said they acted because the Dongyang mayor, Chen Fengwei, had refused to receive them during a town hall open house March 15. Others said the decision was made because residents heard another polluting factory was about to move into the industrial park.

Whatever the trigger, after four years of getting brushed aside, the villagers of Huaxi vowed they were not going to take it anymore. No one would be allowed to come and go from the industrial park.

The Huaxi Elderly Association, which admits farmers 60 and older on payment of a 55-cent annual membership fee, volunteered to staff the tents. The elderly farmers, along with younger men leading the fight, figured police would be reluctant to wrestle with old men and women.

They were wrong. The Dongyang City government dispatched 100 policemen and civilian officials five days after the tents went up, villagers said. The police arrived at lunchtime, when many of the elderly protesters were gone, dragged away remaining protesters and torched the tents, the villagers recalled.

But several thousand angry villagers swiftly surrounded the police contingent, refusing to allow some of the officers to get back into their cars. Ultimately, the policemen were allowed to leave unhurt, a participant said, but several of their vehicles were not released until that evening.

The tone had been set for the confrontation to come.

By the next day, farmers from several of Huaxi's rough-hewn villages showed up to build even more tents. Nineteen were erected within hours, several villagers recalled. About 200 people, most of them elderly, began living in them full time, defying police warnings.

During the first week of April, villagers recalled, the protesting old farmers received a day-long visit from Chen, the Dongyang mayor; Tang Yong, the Dongyang Communist Party secretary; and a high-ranking Zhejiang provincial official. The officials cajoled the protesters in a friendly tone, witnesses said, urging them to leave and promising that polluting factories would be closed.