Rising tide of protests challenges Beijing's desire for social stability

Posted on Tue, Oct. 25, 2005

BY EVAN OSNOS
Chicago Tribune

BEIJING - The last thing Lu Banglie remembers, he was grabbed by the
hair and pulled from the car. He blacked out under a rain of kicks and
punches.

The 34-year-old farmer-turned-activist was accompanying a reporter
from a British newspaper to the southern Chinese town of Taishi, where
they planned to meet villagers campaigning to oust their mayor. But on
the edge of town on Oct. 8, they encountered an angry group of two
dozen men loyal to the mayor, who beat Lu unconscious and sent the
reporter away.

Lu escaped serious injury, but his experience is a vivid, new
illustration of mounting strains between peasants and local
bureaucrats that are fueling a tide of protests across the Chinese
countryside. Recently, a blind peasant in Shandong province, who had
drawn attention to abuses by regional family-planning officials, was
roughed up in a similar run-in with men loyal to local authorities.

Confrontations, sometimes bloody, between strikers or demonstrators
and police have become a near-daily occurrence in China. These cases
do not revolve around high-profile dissidents in Beijing who challenge
the political primacy of the Communist Party. On the contrary, they
stem from ordinary citizens' rising frustration that China's
government has failed to solve bread-and-butter complaints over
corruption, land seizures, soaring health-care costs, pollution and
strains between rich and poor.

In that way, the growth of these small-scale clashes captures a key
evolution in China's politics: Scattered rural protests are not only
becoming more common but more coordinated, stitched together by
Chinese activists who lend support and expertise to a widening array
of causes.

"Partly due to technology and people's new awareness, there is a
growing consensus about the wrongs of governments, and people realize
that they cannot achieve anything if they are not together," said Hou
Wenzhuo, a political rights advocate who heads the Empowerment and
Rights Institute in Beijing. "I think the local governments genuinely
feel threatened."

These clashes are putting pressure on China's political leaders as
they try to maintain the country's breakneck economic growth without
losing their grip on social stability.

President Hu Jintao has vowed to improve the rule of law and foster a
more "harmonious society." But those pledges are in growing
contradiction with his vast national bureaucracy and its attempts to
crack down on the largest rise in social unrest since democracy
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The government counted
74,000 protests, riots and demonstrations in 2004, up 28 percent from
the previous year; the number was 10,000 a decade ago.

In August, the government announced plans to establish special police
units in 36 cities to help stem the threat of riots and terrorism,
authorities said. The party has also tried to curb corruption in its
own ranks by embarking on a campaign to send millions of mid- and
low-level cadres to reindoctrination sessions.

Yet the tensions have only increased. At a key party conference this
month, top Communist Party leaders acknowledged the need to bridge
these social fissures. In mapping out their economic plan for the next
five years, they emphasized the need to eliminate "contradictions,"
including the gap between rich and poor.

Most alarming to the leadership is that the unrest is not limited to
any single area or issue. In one recent case, blind peasant activist
Chen Guangcheng has been under house arrest for more than a month
after organizing villagers to complain about local authorities using
forced sterilizations and abortions to meet family-planning targets.
Two Beijing lawyers who tried to visit him Oct. 4 allege they were
kicked and shoved by a gang of men loyal to local authorities. The
lawyers say Chen was also forcibly returned to his house when he tried
to meet with them.

Some clashes have swelled to encompass thousands. In April, more than
20,000 residents of the Huaxi township in the eastern province of
Zhejiang clashed with an estimated 3,000 police and government
officials who had tried to put down a protest over pollution from
local chemical plants. The protesters torched government vehicles and
repelled police from the scene.

In many cases, it is impossible to divine whether those pitted against
the peasants are state workers, police, developers or other hired
hands - in itself a reflection of citizens' complaints that local
political elites have used 20 years of privatization and economic
reforms to enrich themselves.

Complaints like that are what drew the activist Lu and others to the
Taishi township in the southern Guangdong province. Residents who
accuse their village head of embezzling $12 million in public funds in
a land deal have demanded a recall election.

Clashes and arrests have risen for months, attracting a stream of
activists and journalists to what has festered into a closely watched
test of China's social stability. For a time, villagers' efforts
received mild blessing from the capital, including an editorial Sept.
14 in the state-run People's Daily which praised their campaign as a
"a model for rural village self-rule."

But lately, outsiders' efforts to enter the village have failed. Early
this month, police interrogated and turned back journalists, including
a reporter from The Guardian who was traveling with Lu at the time of
the beating.

The morning after the attack, Lu said he regained consciousness in the
back seat of a car driven by Guangdong officials on the way back to
his home city of Zhijiang in Hubei province. While he was getting
checked out at a hospital that afternoon, he says, a local party
official visited him to warn him off any further involvement in the
Taishi case.

"She said this is an ultimatum," he said in a phone interview.

Like many of this new breed of rural activists, Lu fell into politics
when he helped fellow villagers campaign for tax relief four years
ago, and he was later elected village chief. He has since used his
experience with election law to advise the citizens of Taishi, and he
says the beating will not deter him.

"I have thought about the dangers of these kinds of things," he said.
"Several years ago I bought insurance for myself and my mother and
daughter because what I'm trying to do now will definitely bother some
people's interests."

"To be honest, I will never stop being out there," he said. "I think
the local government should be responsible."

In its first comments on the incident, the central government
emphasized that Lu was not hurt as severely as first reported. Foreign
Ministry spokesman Kong Quan chided The Guardian newspaper, saying it
overstated the extent of Lu's injuries and added, "Today we have
learned he is safe and fine."

Yet, despite acknowledging Lu's beating, Hou, the political rights
advocate, says the government has not vowed to investigate, which
opens the door to further harassment of activists.

"The central government hasn't taken any action and that encourages
the local governments," she said. "Nobody who undertakes these illegal
actions gets punished."

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