Trouble in paradise VI

Villagers were offered 15 yuan (less than $2) each a month as compensation for the confiscation of their land*:

Several hundred residents of Dongzhou Township donned white headbands or clothing and approached the long lines of armed police surrounding their southern Chinese hometown early Friday.

Some got down on their knees and begged the paramilitaries to leave. Others managed to retrieve the bodies of loved ones, or to buy and burn some incense in honor of the dozens of ordinary villagers now missing and feared dead.

“These bullet cases were used to shoot ordinary people on Dec. 6. A few people went out on Dec. 7 and picked them up. By the evening of Dec. 8, the injured, the dead bodies and the bullets were all utterly cleaned away,” a 50-year-old Dongzhou resident surnamed Liu told RFA’s Cantonese service.

“Many older residents and women had been out wearing white, and knelt in front of the soldiers, asking them to leave, to no avail. I don’t know what to say any more. The tanks are still there. All males are being checked coming in and out of the township,” said Liu, who said his young cousin had been hit by a bullet during the crackdown and was now in critical condition in the township’s Yehui Hospital.

“When another brother went to try to find him on Tuesday, he went missing too, and hadn’t been heard of since. I still have my youngest cousin in the Yehui Hospital with a bullet wound, still in critical condition. And his older brother is still missing,” Liu said, saying that overseas media had been slow to react to events in Dongzhou.
Official account

Meanwhile, the authorities got to work to make the official version of events known to the 30,000-strong population of Dongzhou, which lies near the port city of Shanwei, in the eastern part of China’s freewheeling and economically booming Guangdong province.

“Just before 9 a.m., they started to put out official broadcasts from the loudspeakers along the streets saying that the violence had been started by the villagers themselves throwing petrol bombs, and that the police were forced to respond—that the violence was led by a few,” one woman told RFA’s Mandarin service reporter Ding Xiao.

“It said there were three dead and eight injured in the violence stirred up by troublemakers, and that we shouldn’t follow them any more. It said this was from beatings, but didn’t say that they had been shot, or admit that any shooting had taken place,” she added.

Early Friday, a number of Shanwei municipal officials held a meeting at the gates of the local high school, villagers said, and a number of relatives of those who had died tried to make their way there.

“They were holding a meeting there, and some of the villagers told the uncle of someone who had died to go there. When he got there, he saw a lot of people kneeling in front of the officials, begging them to allow them to recover their dead...Some people went to buy incense and lit it for the dead. Then they were crying themselves crazy -- a small group of people.”

One man whose grandson died in the shootings said: “They were kneeling down to ask the armed police to go away and leave us alone...There were around 100-200 villagers. But there was no response.”

He said the authorities had put up posters asking for information on three people who were accused of inciting villagers to protest against the use of land for the power station.

He said his grandson had been shot dead during the clashes, and that relatives had already succeeded in recovering the body.
Some 20 to 30 said missing

Others were still waiting for news of missing loved ones. Estimates of those dead, feared missing, were between 20 and 30, with many unconfirmed reports circulating that bodies had been destroyed.

“Some people said they saw police dressing up three of the villagers’ bodies in police uniforms and taking photos of them,” one man said. “Some also said that several bodies had already been taken to the crematorium and that they had also been changed into police uniforms.”

No reports have emerged of the incident in mainland Chinese media so far: The online transcript of Thursday’s regular foreign ministry press briefing had questions about the Shanwei troubles edited out.

“The officials have been warning us—perhaps it’s because some journalists have arrived—not to ‘speak carelessly’,” the Dongzhou woman said. “We are supposed to say that the dead were killed by our own during the violence, and not to mention that they were shot by the police.”

Villagers denied reports they had forced the police to start shooting by throwing Molotov cocktails first. “They started to shoot first,” one woman told RFA Cantonese reporter Grace Kei Lai-see. “They were the ones to start it.”

Hong Kong’s Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper said Beijing had put pressure on Guangdong provincial authorities to investigate events in Dongzhou, and that a police investigation team had been dispatched to the township.
More police on site

But villagers said they had seen no investigative team, but an increase in the number of armed police compared with Thursday.

An official at the press office of the Guangdong provincial government in Guangzhou declined to comment. “Right now I don’t really know the actual situation. If you would like to report this, you should go through the usual channels, via the propaganda office," he said.

Calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Beijing during office hours went unanswered Friday.

Villagers rejected government plans tabled in late October to pay out 600,000 yuan (U.S. $74,000) a year in compensation for land taken up by the power plant.

“Dongzhou has a population of around 30,000 people, so that works out at between 10 and 15 yuan per person per month,” a local representative surnamed Huang told RFA’s Mandarin service at the time.

“To put it bluntly, that’s not even enough to buy toilet paper. We villagers think that this is unreasonable.”

Under China’s existing arrangements, all land belongs to the state, but land-use rights and limited leases can be sold and exchanged on the open market.

Under the Household Responsibility System brought in by Deng Xiaoping in 1980, rural authorities contract land to the collective, often a village, which in turn distributes it to individual households.

But heavily indebted local governments often fall back on the use of rural land within their jurisdiction for property developments. Rural protesters have frequently reported the use of secret meetings, bullying tactics and mob violence by governments to enforce unpopular land transactions.
RFA callers scathing

Callers to RFA’s Mandarin-language hotlines sharply criticized the crackdown.

“I heard on RFA that at least two, could be four, villagers in Shanwei were shot dead by police….Last year here in Yunnan a policeman shot dead a woman and her son. Are those who are supposed to maintain law and order killing people?” one caller from Yunnan said.

“Hasn’t the government been singing the tune that it’s a harmonious society we live in? But they are using force to rob farmers of their land. Guangdong is a relatively open place and yet such things could happen there. You can imagine what it’s like for farmers in other parts of China.”

* Merely renting an apartment costs a few hundred yuan a month.