HUASHUI, China — The tents are gone, the protesters have dispersed and the police have retreated to the shadows. But villagers remain in jail, local women are still tending deformed babies, and rage burns beneath the surface.
With the spread of pollution-related unrest, a contagious source of instability in the world's most populous country, Huashui stands out as a benchmark more than a year after farmers drew a line in the once-fertile earth.
Not only was it one of the largest known protests, with an estimated 10,000 police officers and desperate villagers battling in April 2005, but it also proved a rare case in which citizen outrage prevailed over deeply vested interests. A few months ago, the last of the area's 13 poison-spewing factories was shuttered.
"Without the riot, nothing would have changed," said Wang Xiaofang, a 43-year-old farmer. "People here finally reached their breaking point."
China's pollution has long been a focus of international criticism as clouds of toxic air waft over California and polluted rivers empty into the Pacific Ocean. Increasingly, however, China's own people are taking to the streets to demand an end to the birth defects, Technicolor water, dead crops and murky air that are robbing them of their livelihoods and lives.
"Environmental problems are increasingly a flash point of rising unrest in China," said Nicholas Bequelin, China researcher with Human Rights Watch. "You're not talking about the size of some woodland or whether to cut old-growth trees. You're talking about life-and-death issues for villagers."
In Huashui, villagers may have forced out the factories, but they have paid a price. Nearly a dozen farmers, including Wang's 40-year-old brother, Wang Liangping, have been sent to prison for as long as five years. Several say they have been tortured.
"We're not the troublemakers," Wang said. "It's the government and the factories that poisoned us. They created the problems, but we're the ones sent to jail."
And local authorities using spies, wiretaps, intimidation and close surveillance keep a tight grip on the area. As villagers spoke with a reporter in Wang's farmhouse, 10 police officers and local officials arrived, tipped off either by tapped cellphones or, as they later claimed, a "patriotic farmer" reporting the "illegal" gathering.
