Chinese village protest gains wide support

John Chan

Heavy-handed police-state responses to protracted protests by thousands of farmers at Wukan village in China’s Guangdong province have increasingly made the 20,000 villagers a national symbol of resistance against the Stalinist bureaucracy and the powerful corporate interests behind it.

Hundreds of paramilitary police armed with automatic weapons and water cannons sealed off the village throughout last week, cutting off food supplies for days. Despite this, the residents’ struggle against the sale of collective farmland to real estate developers has attracted the sympathy of working people throughout the country. Neighbouring villages and town people are providing food and supplies to Wukan.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reporter in Wukan explained: “Interviews with people living near Wukan, meanwhile, suggested widespread sympathy with the protesters there and anger over what the locals said were many similar cases of local officials misappropriating farmland, or failing to pay sufficient compensation for land seized.”

Significantly, the unrest is drawing support from a section of the working class. Last Wednesday, a small demonstration in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, in solidarity with the Wukan villagers was quickly suppressed by the police. The crackdown revealed the Beijing regime’s fear that the protests could trigger broader anti-government demonstrations, not only in rural areas, but in the province’s manufacturing centres.

Last Sunday, three internal migrant workers handed out leaflets and attempted to make a public speech to call for mass support for the Wukan protests were arrested by police, according to a Agence France-Presse report. Yang Chong, from Jiangxi province, told the AFP: “I learned the news of Wukan from the Internet and I want to support the Wukan people. I support their action to defend their rights.” The group planned to hold another demonstration this Sunday.

In September, violent protests erupted in Wukan against a corrupt deal by the village Communist Party committee to sell most of the collectively-owned land to a large pig farm operator, Lufeng Fengtian Livestock, owned by a former deputy chairman of the local Lufeng county government. The pig farm company recently sold the land to China’s top developer, Country Garden. Many villagers had depended on fishing, but a shell-fishing company had eroded the traditional fishing waters. With their livelihoods ruined, villagers took up a collective struggle.

After the September protests, local Communist Party cadres fled, along with a few dozen affluent families living in multi-storey mansions. Villagers elected their own committee of representatives and patrolled the village with guards on motorbikes in order to prevent arrests of leading members. They cut down trees and placed other obstacles on roads, in order to prevent police from entering the village.

The authorities sent in anti-riot units to put down the initial protests in September. Then the villagers were asked to appoint 13 mediators. The purpose, as it became obvious, was to allow the government to find out who were the key leaders. On December 9, four mini-buses of plainclothes agents drove into the village to size five representatives—followed by a deployment of 1,000 armed police. The local guards alerted the entire village, which mobilised to block the police. After two hours of attacking residents with tear gas and water cannons, the police retreated but set up a cordon around the village.

Last Monday, the sudden death in police custody of Xue Jianwan—the elected leader of Wukan’s representatives—provoked even greater anger. No one believed the government’s claims that he died suddenly from a heart attack. Instead, the villagers alleged he was tortured to death.

In an attempt to placate the village, Shangwei prefecture acting mayor Wu Zili declared at a media conference last Wednesday that the authorities were willing to negotiate with the villagers. He promised to review the land deal, but also threatened to punish the key protest leaders. The mayor thundered: “The government will strike hard against ringleaders who organise, provoke and stir up unrest and carry out illegal crimes by smashing and destroying public property and hampering public services.”

Far from being intimidated, some 7,000 villagers turned out to mourn Xue’s death last Thursday. His daughter told the South China Morning Post: “The police accused my father of illegal petitioning and inciting social disorder. But he did nothing wrong. My father was taken away by some plainclothes people, with his hands tied.” The secret police officers were likely to have been dispatched from Beijing’s State Security Bureau.

The next day, over 6,000 villagers gathered at the centre of the village demanding the return of Xue’s body within five days, or they would march to the Lufeng government headquarters. Lin Zuilian, a leader of the demonstration, demanded “democratic elections” not only in Wukan, but for the whole country. “We want democracy,” he declared.

Far from offering “democratic rights,” Beijing is still haunted by the spectre of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, when demands by students for democratic reforms opened a floodgate of working class opposition to the regime’s program of capitalist restoration.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot tolerate a situation in which Wukan’s resistance has generated admiration among millions of Internet users. The banners set up by the government near the village, “Safeguard stability against anarchy—Support the government!” reveal the anxiety in Beijing over the prospect of broader unrest.

An unnamed villager told Hong Kong’s TVB on Sunday that more than 2,000 soldiers had moved into Lufeng township on Saturday night. He claimed it was unlikely that the authorities would use the army to suppress the villagers, “or it will provoke a national uprising or revolution,” because the whole country and the world were watching. He insisted that the soldiers would only protect senior officials who may seek to visit the villagers, because “we are not against the party and the state, or seeking to divide the country.”

Illusions in the Beijing regime clearly exist in Wukan, where banners have stated that the villagers are opposed to “corrupt officials,” and asked the “party centre” to intervene to address their grievances. In reality, the deployment of the army, if confirmed, represents a grave danger to Wukan’s population. The Stalinist police state ruthlessly defends the interests of the major capitalists, such as the billionaire owners of Country Garden, as well as their smaller rural partners, like the farm business owners connected with local party officials.

Beijing’s concerns are amplified by the history of the region around Lufeng. It is known as the birthplace of China’s modern peasant movement during the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution. An early CCP leader, Peng Pai, set up the first education centre there to organise peasants to rise up against landlords, as a mighty supplement to the working class uprising.

The rebellion at Wukan has become a clear indication that the CCP’s restoration of capitalism has regenerated the explosive social contradictions that produced the great revolutionary upsurges of China’s multi-million masses last century.

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Police besiege village land protest in China
John Chan

Thousands of villagers in Guangdong province’s Wukan village staged protests this week following the death of a local leader in detention. About 6,000 farmers gathered in the village on Monday and Tuesday, shouting slogans such as “save Wukan” and “return our farmland.” Wukan is currently surrounded by thousands of paramilitary police officers.

Demonstrations initially erupted in September over the Wukan Communist Party committee’s corrupt deals with one of China’s largest developers, Country Garden, to sell collectively-owned lands for commercial development. Farmers overturned police vehicles and besieged government offices. In November, another protest by 4,000 people demanded the return of the lands, the punishment of corrupt officials, and for the village’s financial records to be made public. The crowd was dispersed by police using teargas.

A petition originally planned to start on December 12 was postponed due to the death of Xue Jinbo, one of the five people who was detained on suspicion of leading the demonstrations in September (see: “Riots erupt in southern China over land sales to developers”).

Xue died last Sunday, after being detained by the police for three days. Although the local Lufeng government insisted he died of heart failure, relatives who saw his body maintained that he was tortured to death.

An unnamed member of a villagers’ committee negotiating with the government told the South China Morning Post: “There were dark bruises on both his back and chest. One of his thumbs was fractured and there were strangulation marks around the neck.” The villagers demanded the return of his body and an independent autopsy, but that was rejected.

The village representative told the newspaper that the authorities had asked for the formation of a temporary committee with which to communicate, only in order to identify the protest leaders. “Xue was the most active and most capable representative,” the committee member told the Post.

Well aware of mounting anger over Xue’s suspicious death, some 100 riot police and police vehicles have blocked the entrance to the village since Monday. Food and water supplies have been cut off. Authorities have put up posters demanding that protesters turn themselves in, declaring: “Confessing to police is your only way out.”

Police numbers have since swelled to the thousands. Internet access has been cut off. Water cannons have been deployed to “ensure stability.” A resident told Agence France-Presse via phone: “People can’t come in and we can’t go out… We won’t survive if the situation keeps going, as we have no food.”

The huge police mobilisation against a community of just 20,000 people is not simply a decision carried out by authorities at the township, municipal or even provincial levels. The propaganda being used to vilify the protesters suggests the direct involvement of Beijing.

Days before Xue’s detention, several thousand villagers took to the streets, some carrying banners declaring, “oppose the dictatorship” of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary and his allies—a slogan that has provoked concern throughout the state bureaucracy. Responding to the villagers’ sit-in, the Lufeng government issued a statement warning that the campaign was “illegal” and was being exploited by “a few people harbouring a hidden agenda.”

Significantly, Zhuang Liehong, another village representative, was detained by the State Security Bureau—Beijing’s secret police—while attending a wedding in Shenzhen in early December.

For the CCP regime, the scene at Wukan is a small but terrifying reminder of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which began with demands by students for an end to “one-party rule,” but ended up unleashing far broader unrest involving the working class.

The CCP is acutely concerned that the country is on the verge of major social upheavals as the economy begins to slow. Zhou YongKang, the CCP Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of state security, last week called on all levels of government to prepare to deal with the possible eruption of social unrest.

Guangdong province, which depends heavily on exports to Europe and America, is facing economic difficulties amid the deepening global turmoil. The province has seen the eruption of strikes in recent weeks, across a range of watch, shoe and electronics factories.

Last week, 4,500 workers and technicians at Hitachi-affiliated Shenzhen Hailiang Storage Products, fearing the loss of jobs and conditions, took strike action against the planned sale of the company to American-owned Western Digital. Another strike last week involved 1,000 Shenzhen workers at Hong Kong-based Topsearch Industries, a circuit-board maker, in opposition to plans to relocate production to Shaoguan, where labour is cheaper.

To defend the interests of business, the Guangdong provincial government has suspended a planned 20 percent minimum wage increase next year—a move that can only provoke further strikes and protests by workers.

The re-emergence of strikes and the growing number of land disputes are interconnected.

Since 2008, China has only avoided a slump by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy via stimulus measures and cheap bank credit. That fuelled a borrowing binge by local governments and real estate developers, and rampant real estate speculation. In 2010 alone, local governments raised 2.9 trillion yuan from land sales. Of the 10.7 trillion yuan ($US1.7 trillion) of local government debt up to June 2010, nearly one quarter depended on further land sales to meet repayments.

The property bubble is now showing signs of cracking. By the end of October, 3.6 billion square metres of property was under construction, compared to sales of just 709 million square metres in the first 10 months of the year. The difference points to a massive glut of property that is about to hit the market and could potentially trigger a price collapse.

These processes are being accelerated by Beijing’s decision in recent weeks to loosen bank lending amid a rapid slowing in manufacturing industries. Cheap credit has only encouraged local governments, like that in Lufeng, to accelerate land sales and enter new speculative ventures as a means of alleviating their financial difficulties.

As a result, protests are becoming more frequent as CCP bureaucrats sell the usage of land to private corporate interests, without even consulting the nominal collective owners of the land, the farmers.

Yu Jiangrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told the Wall Street Journal that 65 percent of “mass incidents” or protests since 1990 in rural areas involved land disputes. Yu estimated that local governments have seized 16.6 million acres of rural land and deprived farmers of $340 billion in compensation, because local governments often pay much less than the market price. Wukan villagers, for instance, allege that local CCP officials sold the land for one billion yuan and pocketed 70 percent of sum before putting the rest in the village fund.

The Wukan protest is a symptom of the growing class tensions throughout rural areas, as a result of CCP regime’s policy of capitalist restoration over the past three decades. While a thin layer of the peasantry has enriched itself and become a new rural bourgeoisie, the vast majority of people have been reduced to poverty, forcing millions into the factories as cheap labour.

The Wukan rebellion is a sign that, like the working class, the oppressed rural masses are being driven into a political confrontation with the CCP police-state. Unlike the protests in 1989, when the peasantry was largely passive, a movement of urban workers now would quickly meet up with mass discontent in the countryside—a situation that terrifies the regime.
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Photo/Caption: Reuters/Arab News
Articles published here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/wuka-d20.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/farm-d16.shtml
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2011/12/21/chinese-village-protest-gains-wide-suppo