China's staid middle class put on a rare show of defiance on Friday over a power project they said is threatening their health due to the proximity of pylons to their homes and some fear may ruin the Summer Palace landscape.
Residents of the scenic middle-class neighbourhood of Baiwang in western Beijing near the Summer Palace, once the garden of China's emperors, argued that pylons near their homes were a health hazard and petitioned the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau to move power lines below the ground.
"Let reporters in. Let reporters in," more than 100 petitioners chanted outside the bureau, where only selected reporters of mainstream state media were allowed into an unprecedented government hearing on the environment.
"Freedom of the press. Freedom of the press," shouted the residents, who wore white T-shirts printed with the slogan "Take down steel towers harmful to people."
It was Beijing's first public hearing on the environment since the July 1 promulgation of a law requiring the government to hold hearings on controversial issues.
Six petitioners were allowed into the three-hour meeting, but the rest, and most reporters, were barred.
Police reinforcements arrived, but no arrests were made.
"Unity is strength. Unity is steel. Unity is iron," the petitioners sang, quoting an old communist revolutionary song.
A power cable across the sky upset the view of the Summer Palace, a favourite retreat of Empress Dowager Cixi in the late 19th century and a major tourist attraction, complainants said.
China's middle class is one of the biggest benefactors of economic reforms and is usually politically tame. They quietly go about making money and keep their heads low in a society that until recently despised private entrepreneurs.
The more than 3 million people who took to the streets in various protests across China last year were mostly laid-off state workers and disgruntled farmers.
Residents of Baiwang neighbourhood, home to about 1,000 families, said they believed electromagnetic radiation from the 50-metre (164-ft) pylons near their homes was a health hazard.
"Electromagnetic radiation would give our children leukaemia and cause cancer," Zheng Haiyan, a 30-year-old businesswoman who bought a 165-square-metre (1,776-square-ft) flat for almost 1 million yuan ($120,000), told Reuters.
Hao Zhiqiang, a 40-year-old engineer, said: "No resident dares to enrol his children in a kindergarten next to a pylon."
The project has knocked down prices of flats in the neighbourhood by about a third, several residents said.
"No one will want to buy our homes. And we have loans to repay," said 40-year-old housewife Fang Xiaomei, who bought a 150-square-metre (1,615-square-ft) flat for 920,000 yuan.
Pylons have been erected near the neighbourhood but lines have yet to installed after residents took turns manning the structures around the clock to stall construction. Residents phone police when power company workers arrive at the scene.
Power authorities painted three of the pylons an environment friendly green to try to appease residents.
Asked if she feared repercussions, Tan Hongyang, a 42-year-old teacher, said: "Our democracy has reached a certain level. I don't think people will be arrested for speaking up."
But some residents had doubts about the hearing.
"It's just for show. It's not the real thing," a housewife who spoke on condition of anonymity said, adding that municipal health officials were not invited to the hearing.
An official with the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said the hearing would help decide whether construction could continue. An official of the power company declined to comment.
Chinese authorities are torn in many places between economic development and environmental protection.
As power shortages spread to more than two-thirds of China's provinces and regions, electricity producers have poured billions of dollars into building new generators. They are scrambling to make up an expected 40,000-megawatt shortfall this year.
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