Dongzhou: A Revolutionary Watershed

The New York Times earns high praise this week for its brave, straightforward coverage of the slaughter in Dongzhou, where Beijing is trying its best to revive the old Maoist terror:

Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, “Stability is paramount” and “Don’t trust instigators.”

It isn’t working. The people are defying both threats and offers of hefty payoffs to tell reporters what really happened to their loved ones:

“Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing,” said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. “If the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan ($6,193), and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it.”

Another villager, who, like other residents, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear or reprisals, said families of the dead who agreed to invoke accidental explosion as the cause of death had been offered $15,000 each.

“The story is being spread around the village that people were not killed by bullets, but by bombs,” said one man interviewed Friday by telephone. “That’s rubbish. Everybody knows they were killed by gunfire.”

. . . .
“The relatives went in tears to the county offices to search for the dead and missing, and they were beaten by electric truncheon, wounded and dispersed,” one resident said.
. . . .

“And if someone from outside asks about the issue, we must say he died by his own bomb. We turned down the offer, and they doubled the money, but we still would not accept it.” The man said his relative had been shot twice, once from afar and again from close range.

Other residents of Dongzhou took the precaution of burying their relatives in secret so that the government would not confiscate the bodies. “We buried the body on the seventh by ourselves, and would not let them know where it is,” said a relative of Lin Yidui, one of the dead. “You should let the dead lie in peace.”

The man said the authorities dared not try the bomb story on him, saying, “We have the evidence.” When authorities have come to comfort his family, saying it was an accidental shooting, the man said he replied, “How could my brother be shot in the heart if you were firing a warning?” Interviews with villagers, both in person and by telephone, made clear that security forces had already imposed a high price on others deemed uncooperative. “They arrested one ordinary villager and beat him very brutally,” said one resident in the town. “His hands were twisted this way, and his whole body is full of wounds. They said he assisted one of the three leaders to escape the village, so they tried to force him to tell them their hiding place.”

Another man told of a woman who had been overheard by the police complaining about harsh repression meted out in the village. “She had said something a bit angry and was beaten by the police,” the man said. “She had just scolded them for being so cruel as to shoot villagers, and she was beaten right there, kneeling and crying in front of many people.”

The people are talking to each other, too, reports Zhang Fei at Timur-i-Leng, via the Washington Post:

At first glance, it looked like a spirited online discussion about an essay written nearly 80 years ago by modern China’s greatest author. But then again, the exchange on a popular Chinese bulletin board site seemed a bit emotional, given the subject.

“In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week?

A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

What makes Dongzhou different than the other recent uprisings in the Chinese countryside? This time, the people fought back:

The Dongzhou episode is something of a watershed because it is the first time that villagers are known to have used explosives, albeit crude and ineffective ones, against security forces. Beijing faces a quandary in that it must rein in abusive local governments without sending the signal that unrest is the best way to obtain concessions.

If true, that contradicts Congress’s characterization of the protestors as “peaceful,” although I know I wouldn’t be very peaceful if someone were illegally evicting me from my land and the source of my livelihood. It’s much more difficult to condemn violence against oppressive, undemocratic governments, given the lack of a nonviolent alternative.

Most worrisome for the Mandarins–and most encouraging for those of us who are rooting for the people of China–are signs that a broad-based opposition, uniting the urban and rural populations, is beginning to emerge:

It also fears the emergence of any solidarity movement between peasants and township dwellers, whose protests have so far been largely unconnected.

Just as worrisome for the central government are the alliances being forged between lawyers, social workers and advocates of change in China’s big cities and rural demonstrators. When Dongzhou’s residents were first confronted with the local government’s plans to build a coal-fired power plant in their midst, few villagers imagined they had any legal rights in the matter.

“Villagers had no knowledge of law,” said one woman by telephone. “The government will do whatever its wants. But later some of us who knew something about law learned the power plant wasn’t approved by the central government, and told other villagers.”

Although difficult to confirm, there are indications that the villagers were emboldened to challenge the plant’s construction through contacts with lawyers elsewhere in China.

Perhaps this tragedy, and the pervasive technology that has spread word of it so quickly, will accelerate the coalescence of a nationwide, democratic Chinese opposition. The rotten, corrupt one-party state could not long coexist with such a movement.