MOSCOW (MRC) -- Hundreds of protesters in southern China marched against a chemical plant and environmental degradation on Sunday in a demonstration that the Maoming city government called a "grave violation" by criminals causing chaos, reported Reuters.
Residents of Maoming, in Guangdong province, were protesting the production of paraxylene, a chemical used to make fabrics and plastic bottles at a plant run by the local government and state-owned Sinopec Corp, China's biggest refiner.
The eastern city of Ningbo suspended a petrochemical project after days of demonstrations in November 2012, and protests forced the suspension of a paraxylene plant in the northeastern city of Dalian the year before. A similar demonstration took place in the southern city of Kunming last year.
As MRC informed before, in November 2013, top Asian refiner Sinopec Corp won initial approval last month from China's top economic planner for a plan to build a USD10-billion refinery and petrochemical complex in Shanghai. Sinopec already started formal planning for the 400,000 barrels-per-day refinery and a 1 million tonnes-per-year ethylene project in a plan to curb pollution by shifting an old plant to Shanghai's southern edge.
Sinopec Corp. is one of the largest scale integrated energy and chemical companies with upstream, midstream and downstream operations. Its refining and ethylene capacity ranks No.2 and No.4 globally. The Company has 30,000 sales and distribution networks of oil products and chemical products, its service stations are now ranked third largest in the world.
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