This report came in from RFA’s Mandarin service(ZH) last night. The Cantonese service had it too, but I was busy writing up their coverage of the Sichuan hotel riot(ZH) (see post below). A lot of good stuff comes in from our language services all the time, and if we pick a story to translate and post in English, we like to follow it properly. Limited time means we can only pick a few.
HONG KONG—Authorities near the southern Chinese city of Foshan have dispatched more than a thousand police and security personnel after local residents staged a protest at the use of their land by local government.
In a dawn raid on the village of Sanshangang in the Nanhai district of the city, police detained nine people, according to several dozen villagers who remained on the watch while the others slept.
“They were all mobilized to deal with us…government officials, police officers, the head of the police department, He Haiqiao. There were about 2,000 of them,” local resident Cheng Huiying told RFA’s Mandarin service.
Guangdong has seen a large number of these confrontations, and I think this is down to a number of factors:
– Guangdong folk seem to be much more savvy when it comes to their rights and interests, possibly because of greater access to Hong Kong media and attitudes. It’s easy to see why Beijing fears Hong Kong’s influence on the immediate hinterland, given that so many people have family and business ties there.
– The province is awash with money, and massive amounts of money can be made on land deals which might not be quite so lucrative elsewhere in China.
– Culturally and historically, Guangdong’s ties with Beijing are fairly weak. It has always been an outward-looking province, and its people are far more likely to know about their rights, and to refer to impartial standards in defending them. And the Cantonese can get pretty feisty. Anyone in any doubt about this should take a look at Bus Uncle (video).
Sadly, as so many cases have shown, knowing your rights and being prepared to defend them isn’t always enough.
“They cordoned off the main intersection in Sanshangang village,” Cheng said. “There were soldiers there too, and they cordoned off the area with police vehicles so we couldn’t sit in on the land.”
Bid to stop building
Villagers had staged a sit-in and tried to stop construction work from going ahead, saying that the land had been taken over for development without their agreement, and that they hadn’t received any compensation.
Police destroyed the tents in which the protesters were camping and ripped down banners hanging there, witnesses said, including a large portrait of Mao Zedong.
Mao Zedong, for all his failings as a leader, remains a powerful icon for China’s farming communities. Peasants, as he would intend the word nongmin. Their use of his portrait should be a sobering warning to the leadership that it has lost its roots. In my personal opinion, to express those roots would be to give farmers ownership of their land, binding them to it far more effectively. The way things are right now, they are treated as if they were the same as the land; something to be bulldozed aside and exploited for someone else’s benefit. Chiang Kai-shek, for all his failings, got this right in Taiwan.
Cheng said there were some clashes as police moved to detain villagers, but that there were seven or eight officers for every detainee. “I heard that nine people were detained,” Cheng added.
One of those detained was Liang Huanpian. Her husband Luo Jilun told RFA reporter Ding Xiao: “There was no official notification, and we don’t know the reason for her detention. She was put in the police vehicle and taken away. I’m now frightened that they’re going to come back for me.”
The authorities’ response to the Sanshangang protest has been swift.
On Tuesday, civil rights activist Liang Weitang was taken away by police, and on Wednesday, four other villagers were ordered to pay more than 50,000 yuan to the property developers by a civil court in compensation for obstructing the development of the disputed land.
What’s interesting is how what we have decided to call civil rights in English (维权 weiquan) is being held onto by ordinary people as a term which commands the legal (and therefore moral) high ground. It is very different from the cultural connotations of human rights (人权renquan), which to the Chinese leadership are a sort of shorthand for ‘nosy Westerners imposing their cultural assumptions on China and interfering in our internal affairs’. Renquan (human rights) is dangerously universal, as a concept. Weiquan activities, while still cracked down on without mercy, tend not to carry prison sentences related to subversion or spying. Instead, participants get charged with ‘obstructing public transport’, and so on. Everything is kept local. That’s why it’s so terrifying for the authorities when petitioners start travelling to Beijing, or standing up for each other out of common human feeling, as happened in Shanghai recently.
Guangxi-based civil rights legal advocate Yang Zaixin, who has been following events at Sanshangang closely, said the development work was illegal, and that the civil case masked a network of crony capitalism behind the scenes.
“It’s very clear that the development that is going ahead is against the law. It is also against a directive on property development issued by the State Council,” Yang said.
“I would imagine that the central government must have taken some notice of this project, given that it’s worth several hundred million yuan, and that it covers such a large area. I don’t think they can just let this one ride,” he said.
Villagers said their methods of protest were legitimate. “This is about justice. All the villagers signed the petition asking them not to start work,” a villager surnamed Guo said.
The protesters pointed to a recent directive from China’s cabinet, the State Council, which forbids any construction work on illegally obtained land designated for agricultural use.
And Guangdong provincial Party secretary Zhang Dezhang has warned that unless the issue of illegal land-grabbing is resolved, further repressive crackdowns would be seen in the Sanshan area.
There is a real difference here between the higher-up leaders who know that local land grabs may bring the entire Communist Party’s house of cards down, and local officials, who see their political power as an opportunity to make money. Well, I suppose that’s what dialectical materialism is all about, in a way. It automatically gives rise, eventually, to doublespeak and doublethink.
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