Page 155 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 6. The Xiamen PX plant event

Place to Live’ by the United Nations, it is a tourism destination with a long history

and exquisite environment. Haicang District is particularly known for its living envi-
ronment and it has become a new hot spot of real estate development in recent years.
Local government vigorously promoted the development of the district and encouraged
a large number of citizens to purchase houses and move to the area. However, in 2006,
with the successful introduction of a Chinese Taiwan para-xylene (PX) chemical plant,

Haicang District was re-positioned as a petrochemical production base (Huang, 2010).
In February 2004, the municipal government of Xiamen approved the building
of the plant without consulting the residents. In 2006, the Tenglong Aromatic PX Cor-

poration invested ¥10.8 billion to build a local PX chemical plant to replace imported
para-xylene. It was expected to create ¥80 billion worth of industrial output per year,
which equals a quarter of Xiamen’s GDP. In July 2006, the National Development and
Reform Commission (NDRC) approved the project and construction began in Novem-
ber (Li, Liu and Li, 2012).

In July 2005, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) had
approved the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the project. Due to the many
benefits it would bring in terms of prestige for local government, annual economic

growth of Xiamen and regional prosperity, it was listed as one of the seven large PX
projects on industrial planning in China’s 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) by NDRC.
It was announced that the new plant aimed would be a world-class petrochemical giant
emerging on the west bank of the Taiwan Strait (Hung, 2013).
Although the building of the plant passed EIA and was approved by the national

government, people were sceptical. To respond to the public’s doubts and ease social
tension, a new EIA was realised. However, more than 90% of citizens opposed the pro-
ject as reflected in both the internet voting and the public hearing (Yao, 2013). Anony-

mous comments, such as ‘[w]e don’t know who and in what ways the EIA was made,
how can we trust it?’, and ‘[t]his must be the government’s trick. They are trying to
fool us again!’ were widely disseminated on the internet (ibid).
In August 2006, the Haicang Land Development Corporation began land expro-
priation for the project and cleared 1.28 square kilometres of land in 40 days. It was

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