Thousands of residents of Maoming, a city in Guangdong province, on Sunday protested over a petrochemicals plant, in the latest example of Chinese people pushing back against toxic chemical production.
Photographs posted on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, showed large crowds carrying placards calling for the facility, which will produce PX or paraxylene – a chemical used in the production of plastic bottles and polyester clothes – to be built at another location.
Some images captured paramilitary police moving through the city, while unverifiable photographs showed people lying bloodied in the streets. One person wrote that four teenagers had been killed in clashes, and a commercial internet portal said police cars had been burnt, but that was again unverifiable.