Violence Over Property Rights Confronts Regime in China

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The Chinese government moved yesterday to contain public anger over the deadliest known outbreak of protest related violence in the country since 1989, when the military used gunfire to disperse student demonstrators who had camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.


A statement from the Guangdong provincial authorities said a commander of the People’s Armed Police, a division of the People’s Liberation Army, was detained for “wrong actions” that led to the deaths Tuesday of villagers protesting land seizures in a coastal town north of Hong Kong. The official statement put the number of deaths at three, but local residents told reporters that the death toll was significantly higher and that as many as 40 people involved in the unrest are missing.


Prosecutors were considering criminal charges against the arrested officer, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said, quoting the Guangzhou Daily, an official newspaper on the mainland.


The acknowledgement that the incident was mishandled is unusual and a departure from the government’s initial assertion that police were “forced to open fire.” A dispatch Saturday from China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, accused demonstrators of “a serious violation of law.” Xinhua said the villagers, who were protesting what they viewed as inadequate compensation for the use of their land for a new coal fired power plant, used “knives, steel spears, sticks, dynamite powder, bottles filled with petroleum, and fishing detonators” to attack the officers sent in to quell the disturbance.


In a possible sign of indecision in the high-level response, the earlier news report about the clashes was removed late yesterday from Xinhua’s English language Web site and replaced with a notice saying that the story had expired or been deleted.


The State Department said yesterday that American consular officials in the region are trying to clarify the situation. “We are concerned about press reports that Chinese police have fired upon and killed protesters in Dongzhou,” a department spokeswoman, Darla Jordan, said. “We encourage transparency and fairness in land transactions and adherence to the judicial process and rule of law,” she said.


An American law professor who studies land disputes in China, Jacques deLisle, said the Dongzhou incident was unusually deadly but fit a broader pattern of disturbances. “There has been an escalating level of protests about expropriation of property,” Mr. deLisle, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Reports are legion and credible of compensation being woefully inadequate or withheld completely. People are not getting anything like market values for their land,” he said.


Official Chinese statistics indicate that in 2004, 74,000 public protests were staged over a variety of issues, including land compensation, pollution, pension payments, and corruption.


A former American ambassador to China, James Lilley, said Chinese leaders are increasingly concerned about the unrest.


“The whole thing is building up. It’s happening. It’s an organic business,” he said.


Mr. Lilley said that if the protests become widespread, the communist regime could turn to a time-honored tactic of mobilizing the populace against an external threat. “The problem here is, if they feel the domestic disturbances are becoming really troublesome, do they start whipping up anti-Japanese, anti-American, and anti-foreigner feeling,” the former ambassador said. “It’s really rough stuff and they feed it. When it gets out of hand, they pull the plug.”


Mr. Lilley said the Chinese government’s greatest fears are the emergence of a charismatic protest leader, such as Polish shipyard electrician Lech Walesa, and the linking of protest movements in various cities, which took place in the 1989 student movement. To prevent the spread of protests, Chinese officials suppress news coverage in the state-run domestic press, though word of demonstrations sometimes filters out to the Western press and on the Internet.


Mr. deLisle said the violence in Dongzhou is especially tricky for the national government because of the village’s proximity to Hong Kong. Some of the earliest reports on the incident came from Hong Kong television, whose reports can be seen in much of neighboring Guangdong Province.


“You have that sort of round-trip of information from China, out and back, and therein more concern that it might spread,” the professor said.


The violence also comes at a sensitive time for nearby Hong Kong. Officials in the semi-autonomous Chinese city are girding for anti-globalization protests as a major World Trade Organization meeting is set to open there tomorrow.


Official accounts of the protests in Dongzhou said more than 300 villagers were involved, but other reports put the number at 1000 or more. The unrest, which apparently was simmering for months, related not only to land confiscation for a new power plant but also to concerns that the plant could damage a nearby fishing ground. Last Monday, the demonstrators surrounded a wind-powered power plant in a nearby village and caused it to be taken off-line for seven hours, Xinhua said. The most serious violence occurred Tuesday night, after police reinforcements arrived and used tear gas to break up the protest, the news agency said. The report named several “instigators” of the demonstration and said at least two people were arrested.


A report in the New York Times said more than a dozen bodies were seen floating in the sea following the clashes.


Mr. deLisle said the government’s typical response to public unrest is to arrest so-called ringleaders, describe other protesters as misled, publicly discipline low-ranking officials, and offer minor concessions to the demonstrators. That approach has worked for the communist leadership again and again, and will likely quell this incident as well, he said.


“The combination of pressure, amelioration, and promises is not something I would count off very easily,” the professor said. “It’s a resilient regime and it’s one that is attuned to the problems it faces.”


Mr. deLisle also said China’s huge size and population tend to buffer the effects of most disturbances. “The thing about China is the sheer scale,” he said. “Even 70,000 incidents scattered all over China is not a threat to the regime. It’s only when people start linking up and they start to look coordinated that it’s a real problem.”


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