The local government has finally taken action to address the pollution caused by cadmium from a chemical plant in the city of Liuyang in Central China's Hunan province. The action comes five years after it was first reported to the local environmental protection department and after a protest by thousands of local villagers last week.

The local government announced that the plant as the source of pollution will be closed, and its leader has been detained. Leaders of the local environmental protection department have also been dismissed from their positions. At the same time, the local government has arranged for the villagers to be medically examined, and experts have been invited to discuss efforts to restore the contaminated but arable land. Financial compensation to affected villagers, too, is in the pipeline.

Yet, all these hardly project an image of the local government as a responsible one. Had it not been for the protest, which blocked the gate of local township government seat and police station, and turned it into a scandal known throughout the country, local government would still be dragging its feet.

The plant started operations in 2004 and since then local villagers have been reporting that it is polluting their farmland. The local government has never given them an answer to where the source of pollution was and what would be done to address the problem. Even when a 44-year-old local villager suddenly died for no apparent reason in May and, on examination, found to have enough cadmium in his body to cause his death, local authorities still failed to accept the seriousness of the situation.

The government should have known, in the first instance, that a chemical plant would likely cause pollution. Had it been a responsible government it should have conducted studies before approving the project and adopted measures to prevent pollution from the very beginning.

Even if local authorities had failed to do so, more than four years of pollution ought to have alerted them, especially after repeated petitions from villagers.

The fact that it failed to act until the villagers launched a major protest is evidence enough for the government to be held responsible for what has happened.

It has become routine for authorities to remain indifferent to concerns of local residents until situations spin out of control. To mention a few, a migrant worker in the city of Zhengzhou had to have his chest cut open to confirm that he is suffering from pneumoconiosis. And, a problematic acquisition by a private firm of a State-owned iron and steel company in a northeastern province ended in a violent protest and the death of a senior manager.

Remedies are necessary, but it is dangerous to let local government leaders get away with wrong decisions or inaction, which leads to minor problems becoming mass incidents. It remains to be seen whether local leaders in Liuyang are duly punished for the cadmium pollution.

(China Daily?August 4, 2009)