Hundreds protest against Chinese chemical plant

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/31/chinese-protest-chemical-plant-maoming

Version 0 of 1.

Hundreds of protesters in southern China marched against a chemical plant and environmental degradation on Sunday, in a demonstration that the Maoming city government called a "grave violation" by criminals causing chaos.

Photos posted on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like service, showed hundreds of people marching along the streets, an overturned car in flames and protesters lying bloodied on the road. Others showed lines of paramilitary police marching in formation.

The images of violence caused an outcry on Chinese social media, and many were removed from the site by censors.

Residents of Maoming, in Guangdong province, were protesting against the production of paraxylene, a chemical used to make fabrics and plastic bottles, at a plant run by the local government and state-owned Sinopec Corp, China's biggest refiner.

The Maoming city government said the demonstration was a grave violation of the law that "seriously affects the social order". It said some demonstrators had hurled bottles and rocks, prompting the police to react.

No one was killed, the government said. It did not state whether anyone was hurt.

In 2012 the eastern city of Ningbo suspended a petrochemical project after days of demonstrations, and a year earlier protests forced the suspension of a paraxylene plant in the north-eastern city of Dalian. A similar demonstration took place in the southern city of Kunming last year.

Choking smog blankets many Chinese cities, and environmental degradation – the cost of the country's breakneck economic growth – has angered an increasingly educated and affluent urban class.