“OPPOSE nuclear pollution”; “Give us back our green homeland”. So declared banners raised by some of the hundreds of protesters who took to the streets of Jiangmen city in the southern province of Guangdong on July 12th. In a remarkable concession, the local government announced that it would heed their demands and abandon plans to build a uranium-processing facility. For officials in Beijing, keen to develop nuclear power and keep activism in check, the demonstration was an unsettling sign of potential trouble.

The protest was the first known major public rally against a project involving the nuclear-power industry since China began building nuclear plants in the mid-1980s. On July 14th residents gathered again outside Jiangmen’s government headquarters (see photo), worried that the $6 billion project nearby had merely been postponed. The city’s Communist Party chief, Liu Hai, emerged to reassure the citizenry that it had indeed been scrapped for good. It is rare in China for officials to concede so rapidly to public concern about such a large project. For one linked to nuclear power, it was unprecedented.

Officials in Jiangmen probably feared that the protests could escalate to the scale of those provoked by large chemical-factory projects in the city of Xiamen in 2007 and Dalian in 2011. Those attracted thousands of people, and also resulted in concessions. Unrest in Jiangmen risked being fuelled by public opinion in nearby Hong Kong which, unlike the rest of China, has a long history of anti-nuclear activism.

Until nuclear disaster struck the Japanese plant at Fukushima in March 2011, hardly anyone in China challenged the government’s ambitions for a rapid expansion of the nuclear industry. Green activism had been spreading, but it was focused mainly on chemical projects such as those in Xiamen and Dalian and on the dumping of factory waste. There were then 13 nuclear reactors in operation. Officials wanted 100 of them to be working by 2020.

Fukushima changed the public mood. Social media, especially Twitter-like weibo services, helped to spread distrust of nuclear power. In response to this, as well as to a global reassessment of the industry’s safety, the government called a temporary halt to nuclear power-plant building. In October last year it allowed such projects to resume, but said that work on about 30 of them that were to be built inland would remain on hold until at least 2015. China’s reactors (now numbering 17, some grouped together) are all along the coast, where there is unlimited seawater to cool fuel rods and disperse radioactive pollution in the event of an accident. The government cited public opinion as a reason for the moratorium: a very new ingredient.

Plans to build a nuclear plant on the south bank of the Yangzi river in Pengze county of Jiangxi province became a prominent topic of public debate. Local officials wanted Pengze to be the site of the first nuclear power plant to be built away from the coast. They had long earmarked a verdant strip of land close to a nature reserve roamed by a rare species of deer for what they hoped would become a proud new landmark. Jiangxi officials regarded it and another proposed power plant on a Yangzi tributary as the “two nuclears” that would become a driving force of development in an energy-starved province. If all had gone to plan the Pengze nuclear plant would have begun to generate power in 2015. Its American-designed AP1000 pressurised-water reactors (a “third-generation” type, said to have more safety features than Fukushima’s) would eventually have a total capacity of 8 gigawatts; the equivalent of nearly two-fifths of Jiangxi’s entire capacity from other sources (mostly coal) at the end of 2012. The state-owned companies behind these projects, as well as investment-hungry local governments, are not abandoning the idea of building them. Before Fukushima, hundreds of millions of dollars had already been poured into preparing the site for Pengze, including the relocation of villagers and levelling hilltops. The area remains fenced off and guarded. (“Any risk can be controlled, any irregularity can be eliminated, any accident can be avoided,” proclaims a large blue billboard on the perimeter.) In June a senior government adviser on nuclear energy said inland projects would “steadily” resume after 2015. Residents of Mopan village on the opposite bank of the Yangzi are worried. “People didn’t pay much attention before Fukushima. After Fukushima there was terror,” says Hong Zengzhi, a doctor of Chinese medicine who can see the Pengze site across the river from the balcony of his clinic. Mr Hong says a village leader, who had disapproved of his opposition to the plant before work began in 2009, apologised to him after the disaster in Japan. Another villager, Wu Duorong, a retired veterinarian, worries about contaminated water flowing into the Yangzi. He penned a poem about the danger: “A river of springtime water flows east; a few families take pleasure but a hundred million mourn.”

Despite such local misgivings, anti-nuclear activism in China has mostly remained low-key (with the recent exception of Jiangmen). Most environmental NGOs in China, aware of the political sensitivity of nuclear power, avoid the issue.

In late 2011, however, four former senior leaders of Wangjiang county, to which Mopan belongs, submitted a petition to the central government calling for the project to be scrapped. They said the area was vulnerable to seismic activity and the plant would pose a risk to local people. Wangjiang’s government echoed their views in a report that was leaked on the internet.

Inter-provincial rivalry, some of it economic, may well have prompted the officials to speak out. Wangjiang county is in Anhui province, not Jiangxi. Pengze stands to gain much from the project, including the possibility of thousands of new jobs. Wangjiang, a half-hour ferry-ride across the Yangzi, stands to gain little.

Not in my front yard

The government in Beijing would be happy if anti-nuclear protests were to stay at the level of bickering between counties or even the occasional outburst of nimbyism, as in Jiangmen. But there is a risk that the success of Jiangmen residents in securing a change of heart could encourage others. “We can expect similar protests wherever a nuclear project is planned,” says Eva Sternfeld of Berlin’s Technical University, who has studied such activism.

As well as complicating China’s nuclear plans, such protests would raise fears in Beijing of something more worrying: an anti-nuclear movement becoming a cover for anti-government activity. Taiwan offers a precedent. In the 1980s opponents of the island’s authoritarian government rallied public support for their cause by tapping into public concerns about nuclear power. The Communist Party does not want to run that kind of risk.