Nuclear pressure groups learn to tread carefully

By Geoff Dyer in Rushan
Published: July 22 2008 03:00

When Hou Guanghui first visited Yintan - or Silver beach - as a 12-year-old, he was so enthralled that he wrote an essay for school, entitled "The First Time I Saw the Sea". So when the former Communist party official retired two years ago, he put down a deposit on a flat near Silver beach.
A week later, he received unwelcome news. The government had unveiled plans to build a nuclear power station at Rushan, near his new retirement home in Shandong province on China's east coast. "We all felt fooled and deceived," he says.
Mr Hou, who divides his time between Silver beach and the industrial city of Zhengzhou in central China, did not take the news lying down. He helped to organise a coalition of opponents that brought together pensioners-turned-activists, an environmental non-government organisation from Beijing and a law professor who was once a student radical. So far, they have managed to halt construction of the plant.
The campaign against the Rushan nuclear power station highlights both the potential and the limits facing pressure groups in China. Beneath the surface of China's communist political system, there are stirrings from a society that wants to be more engaged in decision-making. According to official figures, there are 354,000 registered non-government organisations. But thousands more NGOs are not registered and, collectively, the groups are playing an ever-growing role. "They are a lot more diverse and numerous than many people realise," says Shawn Shieh, a professor at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, who is writing a book on Chinese NGOs. "But despite all the activity, a lot of them are fragile and want to stay beneath the radar."
A flurry of private efforts after the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May has raised hopes that NGOs will enjoy increased space. Their real test in China, however, is when, as in Rushan, their campaigns challenge the government rather than shadow its own moves.
Rapidly rising demand for energy, and widespread pollution from coal-fired power stations, have created a nuclear enthusiasm in China, and the government plans to build 30 new plants by 2020 - the biggest such programme in the world. One of the plants was to be sited near Rushan, only a few kilometres from Silver beach.
Mr Hou and several residents founded a website, called The Best Beach on the Earth, which started collecting signatures of people who felt the proposed plant was too close to a large population. When the website was blocked, they enlisted the help of Dahai (Ocean) Commune, an environmental NGO in Beijing.
Yi Wuchen, a former scriptwriter who runs Dahai, helped to organise the petition, and lodged the 5,000 collected signatures at the State Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa).
Rather than confront the government, the campaigners peeled off potential allies in the state bureaucracy by arguing that the project had not been subject to the correct environmental assessments. Sure enough, while construction work has begun on two other nuclear plants in Shandong, Sepa said in January that the Rushan project had yet to be given the go-ahead.
Hao Xiaofeng, a nuclear safety official at Sepa, says the campaign has had a big impact.
"The region has changed, so the project should be evaluated again," he says. "It is not just about geology, but the broader impact on development."
Even if the plant goes ahead, some campaigners think it has scored a victory by imposing a more transparent decision-making process on planners.
"I think it is progress because the government will no longer build nuclear plants without paying some attention to local people's voices," says Mr Yi of Dahai Commune. Yet the Rushan protest also exposes the restrictions that NGOs face. To deflect potential criticism from the authorities, the Rushan protesters stressed that they were not against nuclear energy as such - only that particular plant.
Such a position makes it hard to find common cause with other campaigns that would raise pressure on the government. "Without any real leaders and without networking, you cannot talk in terms of an anti-nuclear movement in China," says Wen Bo, who runs the China programme of Pacific Environment, a US-based NGO. "These campaigns are still mainly not-in-my-backyard cases."
In order to register in China, NGOs need to find a partner in a government body. Many choose not to, and therefore exist in a legal grey area.
Political acceptance varies from case to case. In some cases, activists flourish. Yet Wu Lihong, a campaigner who complained of pollution in east China's Tai Lake before an environmental disaster poisoned the water last year, is serving a three-year jail sentence over blackmail allegations his family say are fabricated.
For all these reasons, the Rushan campaigners say they will only organise petitions, not demonstrations, and Mr Yi says he would not campaign against other nuclear plants. "If we want to maintain living space for NGOs in China, we have to carry out activities on a limited scale," he admits.
Additional reporting by Wang Bing
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008