Authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu have promised to shelve a planned nuclear waste-processing plant after several days of protests by thousands of residents, who clashed with riot police.
Preparatory work for the Sino-French nuclear project will be halted, the government of Jiangsu's port city of Lianyungang said in a statement on its official social media account.
However, the suspension would be "temporary," the statement said.
Local residents told RFA the announcement came as the government sent in large numbers of security personnel, who told protesters on the ground that the demonstrations were "illegal."
The police have issued a ban on unauthorized public gatherings, while around a dozen people have been reportedly detained.
Photos sent to RFA by local residents showed long rows of green-uniformed, helmeted security personnel armed with truncheons on the city's streets.
"The protests have been going on this whole time [since the weekend], but the city government won't allow people to take to the streets en masse; they say that it's an illegal gathering," a resident surnamed Sheng told RFA on Wednesday.
"A lot of people are pretty frightened right now ... there has been an ongoing crackdown by armed security forces," Sheng said.
"That's why there aren't as many people protesting in total as there were at the start," he said, adding that the numbers had fallen on Wednesday from thousands to hundreds.
A second local resident said the demonstrations have continued every evening at around 6 p.m. since the weekend.
"They don't happen during the working day. People come out in the evenings," the resident said.
Sheng said not many people believe that the government will really halt the project, in spite of the recent statement.
"People here don't really trust what the government says, because they have repeatedly tried to obscure what is going on, and deny the public's right to information," Sheng said.
"It's very hard to say where this will go in future, because people don't trust the government's promises," he said.
Fears among boom
Lianyungang has been earmarked as a potential location for a nuclear fuel-reprocessing plant agreed in principle by French nuclear fuel group Areva and the state-run China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) in 2012.
CNNC currently has a large new nuclear power station under construction nearby.
The nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant has also sparked fears of nuclear arms proliferation in Washington.
U.S. officials have warned the plant would harm efforts to limit the spread of weapons-grade nuclear materials.
Local people say they fear that government safety controls will be inadequate to protect their children from the effects of long-run radiation from materials at the plant.
China is in the middle of a nuclear power station boom, with 34 nuclear power reactors in operation, 20 more under construction, and more in the pipeline, according to the World Nuclear Association.
But a series of meltdowns that followed an earthquake and tsunami at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011 have heightened public fears around such projects.
Environmental rights lawyer Li Shusen said citizens are barred from bringing environmental cases as individuals, leaving them with little choice but to organize public protests.
But he said a "very large number" of cases were brought under the Environmental Protection Law that came into effect on Jan. 1, 2015.
"[Protests like Lianyungang] are essentially nimbyist movements," Li said, in a reference to an acronym based on the phrase "not in my backyard."
"Movements like this one, and the [anti-PX] protests in Xiamen happen because the government hasn't been transparent enough about the projects beforehand," he said.
"With the technology we have today, the pollution and environmental risks of such projects should be controllable," Li said.
"The government should be open with the public about all these projects at the planning stage," he said.
Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Ha Si-man and Gok Man-fung for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.