Astonishing

My only reaction to this story of how Chinese peasants in Huanxi rose up against the authorities and turned their village into China’s first “liberated zone” since 1989. It’s proof of what brave and desperate people can do. Imagine what they could do with guns.

As farmers’ stones rained down and the crowd pressed closer at about 6:30 a.m., the police lines collapsed and panicked officers ran for their staging ground at a schoolyard 150 yards from the tents. Some of them were beaten on the way but many made it into the walled compound and locked the doors.

Two of the farmers, with the calloused hands and dirt-lined fingernails of those who till the earth, later recalled what happened next during a long conversation in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by peach trees. It took several hundred villagers to push down the eight-foot-high stone wall surrounding the courtyard, they said, but it collapsed within a few minutes once they all put their shoulders to the task.

The peasants are still in control. You can read more here (picture, too!), from when the reports of the revolt first emerged.

Is it quite possible to imagine China ruled by its own people?