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Title: Unrest Grows in China Author: Ba Jin Date: July 2, 2005 Language: en Topics: China, unrest Source: Retrieved on 16th March 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/852
Ever wondered what happens in the place where all those MADE IN CHINA
stuff comes from....
With so much processed and grown imported from there and raw materials
exported there a lot Australia.
2005 has seen a sharp upswing in local and international media coverage
of rural uprisings happening throughout China. The most recent of these
took place outside of Dingzhuo city in Northern China’s Hebei province,
and gained widespread media attention as the result of video footage
shot by one of the participants. The uprising took place in a small
farming village called Shengyou, a village in a section of central Hebei
province best known for producing wheat and peanuts.
The story behind the Shengyou uprising is one becoming increasingly
familiar in China. In the autumn of 2003, local officials announced to
the villagers of Shengyou that their land was to be turned over to a
state-owned power company for the building of a coal-ash storage
facility. The farmers who chose to leave were offered a small
settlement. Though some took the compensation, others chose to defy the
edict, refusing to abandon their village and erecting barricades in
clear defiance local authorities. Over the course of the next several
months, these villagers engaged in a tense standoff with police from the
nearby city of Dingzhou. According to villagers, local police detained
several among them whom they perceived as leaders, and at one point
attempted to cut the town off from food and water shipments. The power
company, meanwhile, mounted a series of increasingly violent attacks on
the farmers, recruiting young men in Beijing and transporting them to
Shengyou to harass the farmers.
In April, a group of thugs mounted a midnight attack on the farmers;
during the course of the attack, one young man was caught and detained
by the villagers. This man was held for the next two months, and
released only after a second attack by a larger group. Before being
released, the 23-year-old from Beijing told a reporter from the
Washington Post that he had been paid 100 Yuan, armed with a metal pole
and told to «teach a lesson» to the farmers, and that he was not
mistreated during his captivity.
On the night of June 11^(th), a larger group of men returned to
Shengyou, this time armed with hunting rifles, sharpened metal pipes,
clubs, bricks and fire extinguishers. During the ensuing battle, six
villagers were killed and dozens more injured. One of the injured
farmers videotaped the event before having his arm broken, and managed
to get the tape to the Washington Post. The video shows a gang of young
men armed with pipes and shovels charging into the peasant camp. [1]
There is an explosion, the sounds of gunshots, and screaming. The
cameraman follows the brief battle before being attacked himself, at
which point the video ends abruptly.
The video garnered much international sympathy for the Shengyou
villagers, and as of this writing, the villagers remain in control of
their land. The central government, meanwhile, seems to be trying to
defuse the situation. A report released on June 19^(th) by the Xinhua
news agency states that one construction contractor and 21 accomplices
had been arrested and are being charged with killing the six farmers and
wounding 51 others in the pre-dawn clash. Furthermore, Dingzhou city
Communist Party boss He Feng and Mayor Guo Zhenguang have both been
fired, reportedly on orders issued by the central government.
One emerging item bearing closer scrutiny concerns a possible connection
between the massacre and Li Xiaopeng, son of former Chinese premier Li
Peng [2]:
The Hong Kong daily Ping Guo Ribao (Apple Daily) and other newspapers of
the Chinese Diaspora claim that the man behind a raid by mercenaries
against farmers of Shengyou (Hebei) is none other than Li Peng’s son, Li
Xiaopeng. Six farmers were killed in the raid. Li Peng, who was prime
minister in 1989, is held to be the man chiefly responsible for the
massacre of Tiananmen.
Li Xiaopeng is top manager of the Shenhua Company, an electric power
firm which wants to expel the farmers from their land to build a new
plant to make electric power from high quality carbon. Shenhua is a
subsidiary firm of Huaneng International, the business complex of
electric energy, run by the statesman’s son.
The Shengyou uprising is just one in a series of recent rural uprisings
that have gained widespread media attention. In April, residents of the
Zhejiang province village of Huaxi engaged over 1,000 police and local
officials in hand-to-hand combat, eventually driving the police away.
The conflict was triggered when villagers erected a roadblock to stop
business at 13 local chemical plants that villagers said were making
them sick and poisoning the environment. And on June 29, an urban riot
involving thousands occurred in the eastern city of Chizhou in Anhui
province. According to a one report, this riot was triggered by «a
lopsided roadside brawl.» Six police were wounded and a supermarket
looted before the crowd finally dispersed. [3]
According to Outlook, a Communist party-backed magazine, about 58,000
protests took place across the country in 2003, a rise of 15% over the
previous year. Such figures cannot sit well with a government
notoriously concerned with both the maintenance of social stability and
its own one-party rule.
[1] Available at
[2] Source: Li Peng’s son implicated in massacre of Shengyou farmers
Asia News, 23 June 2005
[3] Source: Thousands riot in China, attack police, burn cars
International Herald Tribune, 29 June 2005.