500 Chinese Fishermen Shut Down a Shipyard to Protest Pollution

Protesting is illegal in China, but that didn't stop at least 500 villagers from storming and shutting down the offices of a shipyard that they say is polluting Luoyuan Bay, according to a report from Reuters.

The 500 villagers in the Fujian province (on the coast facing Taiwan) say they believe pollution from the shipyard is responsible for killing their harvest of the shellfish abalone. Abalone are a mollusk that are raised in floating farms in the area for their meat and iridescent shells.

In August, the farmers petitioned the local Communist Party committee offices to complain about an unusually high number of abalone deaths, but after getting no reply, they took matters into their own hands.

First, "some villagers cornered one of our bosses and wouldn't let him leave, they wouldn't let him drink or eat," Zhang, an assistant manager who only gave Reuters his surname, told the wire service.

The next day, 500 villagers were at the shipyard.

"After work at the yard stopped, they entered the locked offices of our finance and administrative departments and smashed the computers, cupboards … They left after they got tired," Zhang told Reuters.

Though the shipyard was initially made for building ships, the Fujian Huadong Shipyard has been used for repairing ships since 2012, as the global economic turndown killed the demand for new vessels. Zhang said that ship repair usually has a greater impact on the environment, but said the reasons for mass abalone deaths are probably more complex than that.

The abalone farmers have an obvious personal stake in keeping the water clean, but the Chinese public overall feels that more should be done on the environment's behalf.

According to  a survey done by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Public Opinion Research center up to 80 percent of those surveyed believe that environmental protection should a higher priority than economic development. When it came to water in particular, 67 percent of people said they'd like to improve the water environment through donations, taxes, and higher water cost.

Although it is illegal to protest in China without a permit,  protesting on behalf of the environment has been on the rise in recent years, with pollution protests rising about 30 percent annually from 1996 to 2011.

Last year, 16 people were sentenced to prison for their involvement in a protest against a waste pipeline from a paper factory, that also ended in offices being ransacked, documents thrown out the window, and cars overturned. Early this year, a protest against a petrochemical plant—where bottles were thrown and a car was burned—was dispersed by police using tear gas and batons.

Work at the Fujian Huadong shipyard has been halted for a week since the protest, and there's no word when it'll reopen.