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Chinese villagers broke into a smelting plant and smashed up equipment over the weekend. They were protesting the lead poisoning of hundreds of children living lear the plant. Anchor Lisa Mullins gets the details from The World’s Mary Kay Magistad.

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LISA MULLINS: In central China today angry villagers broke into a smelting plant. They tore down fences and smashed trucks to protest the poisoning of hundreds of children living nearby. Nearly all of the children in the village show high levels of lead in their blood. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad says three years ago when the plant first opened authorities ordered the owners to relocate villagers to protect their health.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: They did not move the villagers. They said it was too complicated. But now three years later more than 600 of the children there have dangerous amounts of heavy metals in their blood and of course this can cause muscle damage, brain damage, nervous damage particularly in small children. So not surprisingly the parents are very upset and today they went out to protest.

MULLINS: They went out to protest. In fact some people call this protest riots. And we should say you mentioned about 615 children have been sick. This is out of 731 in the entire village. So it’s understandable the parents are upset. What was the nature of their protest?

MAGISTAD: Well basically that the government doesn’t care about them. That it didn’t protect them. That it cares more about making a profit from factories like this then about their lives and the health of their children. And local governments ignore these sorts of concerns at their peril. This has happened several times in recent months and years. You remember the melamine scandal from a year ago. You remember the schools that collapsed in Szechwan in the earthquake. And both times you had parents who were saying you know you only allow us to have one kid and then this is what you do to those kids.

MULLINS: So what’s the company itself saying – this lead and zinc smelting company?

MAGISTAD: It was kind of interesting that they had a very long piece on this on state-run television where they were showing the factory managers and local officials looking very uncomfortable on camera. They weren’t trying to make excuses for them. They let them speak for themselves and they showed how concerned the families were. What the factory managers were saying was you know look we would have moved the village but it was complicated and there are 20,000 jobs here and if we were to shut down the factory people would lose their jobs and that would be a big economic loss. And they didn’t really address the point that there were a lot of very sick kids and that their factory had caused it.

MULLINS: I wonder… You know what you said about the company’s reaction sounds fairly cavalier. Is the government any more aggressive in terms of trying to help the families and take care of the kids?

MAGISTAD: I think the government’s recognizing that it needs to step in and be more proactive in this case. And the fact that it covered it in a sympathetic way on state-run television at a national level suggests that once again it’s trying to show the central government cares about situations like this. And if there’s a problem it’s at the local level. And this is something that many Chinese people believe. Although there is actually an issue where the central government, if it really wanted to, enforce environmental standards that do exist could be more proactive in doing that. But it has a constant negotiation it has to do with provincial-level leaders and even county-level leaders and it kind of has to pick its fights. So if it wants those local leaders to get behind it on certain things maybe it has to be a little bit more relaxed on other things. In the past those other things were often environmental standards.

MULLINS: Alright thank you very much for the update. From Beijing, The World’s Mary Kay Magistad. Thank you.

MAGISTAD: Thank you Lisa.

MULLINS: This is PRI.

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