China bows to activist pressure over refinery

China has taken the unusual step of moving a $5bn refinery and petrochemical plant, one of the country’s biggest foreign investment projects, after a public outcry, a senior Communist party official said on Thursday.
The decision to relocate the plant is the highest-profile victory so far for China’s loosely organised but increasingly aggressive envirWang Yang, party secretary of Guangdong province and south China’s most powerful politician, attributed the decision to shift the joint venture project of Sinopec, the Chinese state owned refiner, and Kuwait Petroleum Corp, to “strong criticism from the community”.
“This reflects how Guangdong values environmental protection, the ecology and the opinions of our citizens,” said Mr Wang, who sits on the party’s 25-member Politburo, in a rare interview with foreign reporters. “It was a very difficult decision to make because [the project] has been approved by the state council and signed by the partners.
“We only have one planet to live on and whatever we do at this end affects people at the other end,” he said.
The plant was to be built in southern Guangzhou, the provincial capital, 60km upwind of Hong Kong, where the project has also come under criticism.
Last year, 14 delegates to the provincial people’s congress filed a motion opposing the refinery on the grounds that it could worsen regional air pollution. That opposition emboldened environmental officials, who also began to question the project’s suitability pending the completion of an environmental impact report.
Mr Wang declined to reveal where Sinopec and Kuwait Petroleum had agreed to move the plant to. Privately, provincial officials say it is most likely destined for the industrial port of Zhanjiang in western Guangdong, a much less populated and ecologically sensitive region.
The project was to have been sited in a new heavy industrial zone in the geographical centre of the Pearl river estuary, not far from a bird and wetland sanctuary. The site was marked out last year and villagers were relocated to new housing closer to the centre of Guangzhou.
The relocation is in keeping with a larger push by Mr Wang to engineer an industrial restructuring of the province, which accounts for about a third of China’s exports and which suffered a 20 per cent fall in foreign trade since the onset of the global financial crisis.onmental and community activists.