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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

Ba Jin

Unrest Grows in China

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

www.washingtonpost.com

[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.