A township government in Jiangsu province vowed on Thursday that it would spare no effort in shutting down environmentally hazardous chemical plants to protect the health of locals after they staged a protest last month.

More than 200 villagers from Bieqiao town in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, stage a demonstration at the entrance to an industrial park.[China Daily]

On April 27, more than 200 villagers from Bieqiao town in Changzhou blocked the entrances to a local chemical industrial park, which they said had seriously polluted the local environment and jeopardized people's health over the past seven years.

Their protest came after years of calls for the village to be relocated went unheeded by the local government, according to a report in Modern Express, a local newspaper.

The report said some villagers even erected tents on the site, in an effort to prevent staff and vehicles from entering the industrial park. They also demanded that all the chemical plants should stop production and that the local population be relocated.

Wang Weidong, press officer with Bieqiao township government, told China Daily on Thursday the government had listened to the villagers' complaints and that an emergency meeting was held on Wednesday to address the issue.

"We'll conduct a thorough review of the existing chemical plants and plans will soon be rolled out to either shut down or upgrade the companies," he said, adding that production at all 19 of the chemical plants in the industrial park had been suspended.

But for locals like 40-year-old villager Shi Jinfang, the price they have been forced to pay is too high. "My health has rapidly deteriorated in the past few years. I often feel light in the head and suffer breathing difficulties," Modern Express quoted him as having said.

Villagers had complained of headaches and vomiting after inhaling pungent toxic gases and eating vegetables that had been contaminated by sewage water discharged from the plants.

Shi also said locals now have to buy vegetables from outside the village and that no fish could be found in the local waterways.

All of the villages bordering the industrial park should have been relocated by the end of 2009, according to an environmental impact assessment report from the provincial environmental protection bureau in 2007.

Wang explained that villagers in Bieqiao are divided over where to relocate and that the local government would rather reduce the scale of the industrial park to minimize the environmental impact of the chemical plants than to move people out.

"We've been working on this for years," he said. "Obviously, we don't want to pursue GDP growth at the cost of the environment."

However, as Wang pointed out, the discharge from every factory is up to standard, so closing them poses serious challenges.

"As is true in many parts of China, it's the overall discharge from all the companies that has exceeded the local environmental capacity," he said. "So it should draw our attention to the need for industrial planning in the first place."