As a series of heated protests against chemical plants, metal factories and heavy industries have rocked China, experts have called on the government to listen to the public's objections, or risk making the situation worse.

Yang Chaofei, the deputy director of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences told the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Friday that China needs to consider pollution damage compensation laws as well as regulations to allow environmental lawsuits based on the public interest.

He also told the committee that polluters in China rarely see the inside of a courtroom, let alone receive a guilty verdict. According to Yang, the number of environmental protests in China has been increasing at an average rate of 29 percent per year since 1996, but less than 1 percent of the environmental disputes were settled through laws or the court system.

A 'sensitive' bottleneck

Environmental authorities received more than 300,000 environmental petition appeals from 2006 to 2010, while just 1,100 of these were processed at court, Yang said at the lecture. When it comes to big projects that are beneficial for the local economy, appeals from pollution victims are sometimes turned down by courts for being too "sensitive," he noted.

This can lead to protests, which tend to begin with petitions, then when the government turns a blind eye to public appeals they grow into larger protests, said Cheng Yuyan, a law expert with the Guangdong Institute of Public Administration, who has studied China's environmental protests.

"As the situation regarding pollution gets worse, members of the public might use this as a chance to express dissatisfaction over other social problems," Cheng added.

Ignored and outraged

Another reason for the large scale protests is that many cases remain unresolved despite appeals to the court, said Liu Jinmei, a lawyer with the Center for Legal Assistance for Pollution Victims under the China University of Political Science and Law.

Around one third of the cases the center processed never made it to the court, said Liu, with the lawsuit appeals rejected either because the projects bring in a lot of money, or the company has strong connections with the government.

"There are few organizations in China that provide pollution victims with legal consulting services for free, so most of the time people don't know whom to turn to for help when their living environment is endangered. Some only start seeking help when the case has passed a prescribed period for litigation, or they don't have access to essential evidence, which means they lose their cases if they are fortunate enough to even have their cases accepted by the courts," Liu said.

One example is Xu Yu, a 62-year-old villager in Liaoning Province, who said he felt powerless after a four-year appeal with the courts against a polluting chemical plant failed to make any progress.

He said that since a chemical plant was established in the Zhangjiayingzi township, Jianping county, in 2008, there had been several major incidents of poisoning involving nearby residents, including one that involved some 300 students who showed similar symptoms of being poisoned in October 2008. Residents attributed it to pollution from the plant and attempted lawsuits, but were turned down by the courts.

"I appealed at the village, county and municipal courts but they all told me they couldn't accept the case because it's a case involving a group of people rather than a personal dispute," Xu said. Hundreds of residents rallied at the township government for a protest and thousands signed an appeal letter to environmental authorities during the past four years, but the local government and courts always attempted to dodge their responsibilities, he said.

Xu tried to submit an appeal to the Supreme People's Court in Beijing in August 2010, but was detained by county police for 10 days after he was sent home.

The environmental protests also reveal growing public demand for participation in politics, said Tang Hao, an associate professor of politics at South China Normal University. In recent years, environmental campaigns that began from small groups including environmental activists and scholars, have morphed into massive street protests involving ordinary people. Tang said, adding that fortunately, so far, the protests had not been particularly violent, but if there was no action on this issue, there was a risk that this could change in future.

Learning from the past

Some local governments are repeatedly making the same mistakes when dealing with protests, said Tang. He said they shouldn't try to suppress public objections and label protesters as "people with ulterior motives."

"That only makes people angrier, gives the government an excuse to use force, and leads to escalated results," Tang told the Global Times.

Lin Yanmei, the assistant director of a Sino-US environmental cooperation project under the Vermont Law School in the US, told the Global Times that there were much more aggressive protests in the US before the country established a set of environmental laws in the 1970s, which allow for input from the public and NGOs.

"Currently in China, people tend to seek solutions to environmental issues through means other than the law, which they don't have much faith in, and the government works toward maintaining social stability instead of encouraging legal action," Lin told the Global Times.