The Beijing News
September 5, 2008

At a press conference yesterday, Yin Xiufeng, head of the administrative commission of Beijing's Chaoyang District, apologized to residents of Gao'antun for the stench coming out of the garbage dump that has been part of their life for several years now.

Beijing-based newspapers, including Beijing Youth Daily and The Beijing News (which curiously does not mention Yin by name) reported this story today. Yin promised to make a "substantial improvement" in 20 days and committed to "zero unprocessed waste in the landfill by 2012."

Only a few years ago, Gao'antun was still a farming village in the east part of Beijing's Chaoyang District. Like many other villages on the expending edges of the fast growing city, high-rise apartment buildings began to shoot up in Gao'antun in recent years. Along with the buildings came the city's new affluent class, able afford 15,000 yuan per square metre apartment prices and unlikely to welcome a stinking landfill.

According to The Beijing News, local villagers receive a 400 yuan per year per capita subsidy from the government for the stench that they have to suffer. But many villagers would rather have the landfill site moved somewhere else. The newspaper quoted a villager saying that the incidence of serious diseases has risen in recent years and suspected that it might has to do with the smell. Zou Xiaomei, a delegate to the city's People's Congress, has brought up the issue every year only to find things getting worse and worse.

The government's apology came after a protest on August 30. The protest took the form of a "stroll," a technique that has been carried out by the environmentally-aware, new middle class, who organize and coordinate their activity via SMS and the Internet. Last year saw strolls put into practice in Xiamen, Shanghai, and Chengdu.

None of the mainstream newspapers covered the protest, but reports could still be found on a handful of blogs that survived Internet censorship.