Last month’s clash between villagers and police in Wukan over alleged secret land sales and corruption underscores public’s growing dissent
Choi Chi-yuk in Lufeng 07 October 2011
How could a model village become the scene of bloody rioting that left dozens of people injured and police vehicles smashed and overturned?
Wukan in Lufeng, a coastal county in eastern Guangdong, has been feted across the mainland for years as a model village - harmonious, civilised and prosperous. Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang visited it in 2008, just over six months after taking office.
“Wang came here on August 6, just two days before the opening of the Beijing Olympics,” said a middle-aged villager. “I still remember the report carried by the Nanfang Daily quoting Wang as telling a fellow villager, ‘I’m so delighted to see all of you lead a happy life here.’
“How could I imagine at the time that massive clashes triggered by illegal land seizures would happen in my village just three years after his trip?”
On the morning of September 21, hundreds of villagers took to the streets and staged a sit-in protest against local officials for “secretly selling” hundreds of hectares of collectively owned farmland to a real estate developer and “embezzling” more than 700 million yuan (HK$853 million) of compensation money since 2006, a young woman who saw the protest said.
“Some policemen were sent in and severely beat some teenage schoolchildren who had sounded the brass gong to urge fellow villagers to join the protest that morning,” she said. Upon hearing that several of the youngsters had been seriously injured and sent to hospital, hundreds of furious villagers fought back before laying siege to a local police station in which 30 to 40 officials and policemen had taken refuge.
Hundreds of fully equipped riot policemen then engaged in a stand-off with peasants armed with iron bars or wooden clubs. “At this point, some said two of the teenagers were severely hurt and in critical condition,” she said.
“Others suggested they might have died because no one knew their whereabouts in the hospital.”
The rumours spread like wildfire and thousands of villagers blocked the nearby highway and smashed the windows and overturned at least six police vehicles.
When asked to comment on the violence, the first thing local officials tried to do was clarify the rumours that led to the clashes.
Ouyang Liu, the deputy head of the Donghai township government, which oversees Wukan village, said last Sunday that local government cadres had their own grievances.
One of the officials besieged in the police station from 9am until 11pm, said: “Nobody has ever been killed, nor a single inch of land has ever been sold. All of the stuff is nothing more than rumours spread by some ill-minded people.”
Residents in quite a number of villages near Wukan complained that their farm land had been stolen and sold by village officials to factory owners or property developers, leaving them with no land to till, forcing them to buy grain with the meagre income they earned by working in urban areas. They said they had been petitioning different levels of government for years, to no avail.
Some pledged to take radical action if their demands were not addressed in the wake of the Wukan rioting. Local officials said most of them were “unaware of the truth” and were being exploited by troublemakers. Even though video footage recorded by villagers during the rioting in Wukan showed men, women and children being chased and sometimes beaten by truncheon-wielding riot police, Ouyang repeatedly denied that any such thing had happened.
A villager in his 60s said he saw a man taken to the police station’s courtyard, knocked to the ground by three policemen and then attacked by another policeman wielding a baton. Referring to the land grab allegation, Ouyang admitted that some workers and local officials had gone to survey the site along with representatives of potential property developers, but said no contract had yet been signed.
Rumours about the deaths of two schoolchildren, which fuelled the clashes, appear to be groundless, with no families in the village, home to about 12,000 people, having performed funeral rites in the past week.
In June, thousands of angry migrant workers hurled stones and bricks at police in Zengcheng, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, when they heard widespread rumours that a pregnant 20-year-old street vendor from Sichuan had been pushed to the ground and her husband killed by security personnel for “illegally occupying a village road to sell goods” and “refusing to pay a protection fee”.
Although the husband surfaced to tell a local broadcaster that his wife and unborn child were fine, and Zengcheng’s party chief personally delivered a basket of fruit to the couple the next morning, thousands of migrant workers took to the streets for the next two nights, blocking traffic, overturning police cars and torching government buildings.
Experts attribute such violent reactions to simmering dissent among the general public and a lack of local government credibility.
“On the one hand, the government’s low trustworthiness is blamed for the dissemination of the rumours,” said Professor Yuan Weishi , a historian at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
“And on the other hand, the lack of effective channels to publicise the truth in rural areas is another key reason.” In a bid to stem the flow of updates about the Wukan rioting, the popular Sina Weibo microblog blocked searches for terms such as “Lufeng” soon after the protests began. And many villagers in Wukan said they were extremely disappointed with reports carried by the Guangdong media, accusing them of telling one side of the story and portraying locals as mobs who assaulted and injured dozens of riot policemen.
Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, professor of public and social administration at City University, who shares a similar view, said: “The extremely low level of credibility of some local governments and mounting disappointments are both dominating factors for the emergence and swift spreading of such rumours among ordinary civilians.” Rumour-triggered riots would continue if regional governments continued to ignore such problems, he warned.
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Rioting in model village attests to graft woes
Last month’s clash between villagers and police in Wukan over alleged secret land sales and corruption underscores public’s growing dissent
Choi Chi-yuk in Lufeng
07 October 2011
How could a model village become the scene of bloody rioting that left dozens of people injured and police vehicles smashed and overturned?
Wukan in Lufeng, a coastal county in eastern Guangdong, has been feted across the mainland for years as a model village - harmonious, civilised and prosperous. Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang visited it in 2008, just over six months after taking office.
“Wang came here on August 6, just two days before the opening of the Beijing Olympics,” said a middle-aged villager. “I still remember the report carried by the Nanfang Daily quoting Wang as telling a fellow villager, ‘I’m so delighted to see all of you lead a happy life here.’
“How could I imagine at the time that massive clashes triggered by illegal land seizures would happen in my village just three years after his trip?”
On the morning of September 21, hundreds of villagers took to the streets and staged a sit-in protest against local officials for “secretly selling” hundreds of hectares of collectively owned farmland to a real estate developer and “embezzling” more than 700 million yuan (HK$853 million) of compensation money since 2006, a young woman who saw the protest said.
“Some policemen were sent in and severely beat some teenage schoolchildren who had sounded the brass gong to urge fellow villagers to join the protest that morning,” she said. Upon hearing that several of the youngsters had been seriously injured and sent to hospital, hundreds of furious villagers fought back before laying siege to a local police station in which 30 to 40 officials and policemen had taken refuge.
Hundreds of fully equipped riot policemen then engaged in a stand-off with peasants armed with iron bars or wooden clubs. “At this point, some said two of the teenagers were severely hurt and in critical condition,” she said.
“Others suggested they might have died because no one knew their whereabouts in the hospital.”
The rumours spread like wildfire and thousands of villagers blocked the nearby highway and smashed the windows and overturned at least six police vehicles.
When asked to comment on the violence, the first thing local officials tried to do was clarify the rumours that led to the clashes.
Ouyang Liu, the deputy head of the Donghai township government, which oversees Wukan village, said last Sunday that local government cadres had their own grievances.
One of the officials besieged in the police station from 9am until 11pm, said: “Nobody has ever been killed, nor a single inch of land has ever been sold. All of the stuff is nothing more than rumours spread by some ill-minded people.”
Residents in quite a number of villages near Wukan complained that their farm land had been stolen and sold by village officials to factory owners or property developers, leaving them with no land to till, forcing them to buy grain with the meagre income they earned by working in urban areas. They said they had been petitioning different levels of government for years, to no avail.
Some pledged to take radical action if their demands were not addressed in the wake of the Wukan rioting. Local officials said most of them were “unaware of the truth” and were being exploited by troublemakers. Even though video footage recorded by villagers during the rioting in Wukan showed men, women and children being chased and sometimes beaten by truncheon-wielding riot police, Ouyang repeatedly denied that any such thing had happened.
A villager in his 60s said he saw a man taken to the police station’s courtyard, knocked to the ground by three policemen and then attacked by another policeman wielding a baton. Referring to the land grab allegation, Ouyang admitted that some workers and local officials had gone to survey the site along with representatives of potential property developers, but said no contract had yet been signed.
Rumours about the deaths of two schoolchildren, which fuelled the clashes, appear to be groundless, with no families in the village, home to about 12,000 people, having performed funeral rites in the past week.
In June, thousands of angry migrant workers hurled stones and bricks at police in Zengcheng, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, when they heard widespread rumours that a pregnant 20-year-old street vendor from Sichuan had been pushed to the ground and her husband killed by security personnel for “illegally occupying a village road to sell goods” and “refusing to pay a protection fee”.
Although the husband surfaced to tell a local broadcaster that his wife and unborn child were fine, and Zengcheng’s party chief personally delivered a basket of fruit to the couple the next morning, thousands of migrant workers took to the streets for the next two nights, blocking traffic, overturning police cars and torching government buildings.
Experts attribute such violent reactions to simmering dissent among the general public and a lack of local government credibility.
“On the one hand, the government’s low trustworthiness is blamed for the dissemination of the rumours,” said Professor Yuan Weishi , a historian at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
“And on the other hand, the lack of effective channels to publicise the truth in rural areas is another key reason.” In a bid to stem the flow of updates about the Wukan rioting, the popular Sina Weibo microblog blocked searches for terms such as “Lufeng” soon after the protests began. And many villagers in Wukan said they were extremely disappointed with reports carried by the Guangdong media, accusing them of telling one side of the story and portraying locals as mobs who assaulted and injured dozens of riot policemen.
Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, professor of public and social administration at City University, who shares a similar view, said: “The extremely low level of credibility of some local governments and mounting disappointments are both dominating factors for the emergence and swift spreading of such rumours among ordinary civilians.” Rumour-triggered riots would continue if regional governments continued to ignore such problems, he warned.
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