Texting a Political Protest

In the cat-and-mouse game that characterises political protest in China, the mice won a round this week. They did it by finding a new way to use a familiar form of technology.

In the cat-and-mouse game that characterises political protest in China, the mice won a round this week. They did it by finding a new way to use a familiar form of technology.

Opponents of a chemical plant being built in the coastal city of Xiamen used cell phone text messaging to distribute their warning of dire consequences if the factory opened.

8220;Once this extremely poisonous chemical is produced, it means an atomic bomb will have been placed in Xiamen,8221; the text message said in Chinese characters. 8220;The people of Xiamen will have to live with leukemia and deformed babies. We want our lives and health!8221;

Spreading like a virus, the message was repeated more than a million times, environmentalists said, until it had reached practically everyone in Xiamen she-ah-men, a city of 1.5 million people in southeastern China known for its clean air and scenic views. It was also splashed on walls and posted in blogs and other websites throughout China.

On Wednesday, in a move that caught everyone by surprise, municipal authorities announced they were suspending construction of the plant.

It remains unclear whether China8217;s growing environmental movement will ultimately win the fight to stop the toxic chemical p-Xylene from being produced in Xiamen. Local authorities initially insisted that the halt in construction was merely temporary. Then, on Thursday, Vice Mayor Ding Guoyan was quoted in the official China Daily newspaper as saying, 8220;The city government has listened to the opinions expressed and has decided, after careful consideration, that the project must be re-evaluated.8221;

P-Xylene is a petrochemical used in making films and fabrics. It is considered highly toxic, and has been linked to birth defects in animals. The 1.4 billion factory was being built by the Tenglong Aromatic PX Co. Ltd., 16 miles from the city centre, adjacent to a neighborhood of 100,000 people, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

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Whatever ultimately happens, the cell phone campaign clearly had an impact, and both participants and outside observers hailed it as a powerful form of protest8212;the latest in a series of technological advances that periodically erupt like wildfires in China.

Student protesters who filled Tienanmen Square in 1989 used fax machines to send and receive news about their fight, leading to a crackdown on the use of faxes. Similarly, the advent of the Internet and e-mail brought a new organising tool, one still in use despite a massive, and largely successful, government effort to control it.

Information about the Xiamen plant on numerous websites vanished suddenly on Wednesday as authorities sought to control the outpouring of dissent.

But cell phones present a new challenge to the government, since all but the poorest in China own one and text messaging is used far more often, and by a wider span of ages, than in the US, where it tends to be a tool of the young.

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Still, the Chinese do have the means to crack down: in 2004, the government provoked an outcry by purchasing a surveillance system for cell phone messages that allowed it to filter objectionable messages and pinpoint senders. In 2005, authorities temporarily banned the use of text-messaging after it was used to organise violent anti-Japanese protests.

Los Angeles Times