GEOFFREY YORK

Saturday, December 17, 2005 Posted at 2:15 AM EST

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

A Burst of Gunfire Exploding in Darkness

China's clampdown on a village protest raises fears it hasn't abandoned tactics used at Tiananmen Square, reports Geoffrey York

Beijing — Darkness had fallen on the fishing town of Dongzhou when the
riot police marched into town. There were hundreds of them, carrying
shields and wearing helmets and body armour.

It was the night of Dec. 6, a little more than a week ago. Just a few
hours earlier, police had clashed with hundreds of villagers fighting
the seizure of their land for a power plant. Now the paramilitary
troops were back in full force — and with assault rifles.

The police had been ordered to arrest the protest leaders in this town
of 10,000 people in southern China. A throng of villagers gathered to
confront them.

At first, it seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary, just another of
the rising number of street protests that erupt in China every year.

But what happened in the next few minutes was a shocking sign of the
mounting violence of those clashes, a violence that China's leaders
and some students of the regime believe could one day threaten the
stability of the Chinese government.

The ruthless suppression of the villagers of Dongzhou was a troubling
reminder that China has not yet abandoned the brutal tactics that led
to the slaughter of hundreds of students at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Fearful of retribution, most villagers refused to discuss the clash,
but dozens did provide a detailed account of the terrifying moments
when the police opened fire.

Standing in the darkness with the crowd of villagers that evening was
a 30-year-old factory worker whose surname is Chen. He and his
26-year-old brother-in-law, Lin Yidui, had left their home separately
to search for his mother and bring her back from the dangerous
confrontation. Now they were both caught up in the crowd, transfixed
by the menacing line of police.

The mood was turning ugly. The hundreds of protesters stood about 200
metres away from the heavily armed police. Some were threatening the
police with Molotov cocktails and fishing detonators.

About 7 p.m., the police stood aside to make room for a large vehicle
with two bright spotlights on the top. The darkness was so thick that
the villagers couldn't make out the purpose of the vehicle.

Mr. Chen assumed it was a water cannon. On television, he had
sometimes seen the police using them to disperse a crowd.

A few minutes later, he heard a noise that astonished him. It was a
burst of gunfire from an automatic weapon. In the glare of the lights
from the police vehicle, he could see flashes of flame from the guns.
It looked like firecrackers exploding in the darkness.

Within moments, there was chaos in the crowd. "Run for your lives,"
somebody shouted. "They are shooting."

Fresh bursts of gunfire kept coming. Wherever the spotlights landed,
the bullets followed. The police were moving forward. "Charge!" some
of the police yelled.

A minute later, Mr. Chen heard a cry from a man on a motorcycle near
him. "I'm shot, I'm shot," he moaned as he fell.

He and another man grabbed the injured man. They put him on the
motorcycle and raced to the nearest hospital, about a kilometre away.

When they reached the hospital, where there was enough light to see
properly, he was shocked to discover that the injured man was his
brother-in-law, Lin Yidui.

Mr. Chen couldn't believe it. His brother-in-law was not a protest
leader. He was running a business in Shanghai and was planning to be
married soon. He had returned to his hometown just a few days earlier
to gather documents for a marriage certificate.

The doctors rushed to help the injured man. He didn't seem badly
wounded — there was no visible injury, no blood on his face or
clothes.

But when they tore open his clothes, they discovered a small bullet
hole over his heart. When they pressed his chest, blood came gushing
up from the wound. He was dead.

Back at the scene of the confrontation, others were dying, too. An
elderly man was among those at the front of the crowd of villagers.
He, too, was shot. With a gunshot wound to his leg, he fell to the
ground, unable to move. And then, according to the accounts of several
villagers, he was shot again and killed. According to those same
accounts, the police chased other villagers, up a hill or into the
sea, and shot them, too.

The gunfire continued sporadically all night. Some villagers heard
shots as late as 3 a.m.

The next morning, Mr. Chen went back to the hospital and took home the
body of his brother-in-law. According to traditional Chinese custom,
the body had to be buried right away. So, that afternoon, the family
put him in a coffin and buried him quietly in a rough plot near their
home, with only his family present.

In the following days, the blood stains at the site of the
confrontation were washed away by a police vehicle. But the villagers
gathered their own evidence: hundreds of spent bullet shells.

Five days after the shooting, the police commander who ordered it was
detained for "mishandling" the conflict. Officially, the authorities
have acknowledged that three villagers were killed and eight injured
in the shooting. The villagers insist that many more — perhaps as many
as 20 —were killed by the police gunshots, and dozens more were
injured. Dozens of protesters have disappeared, and nobody knows if
they are in police custody or dead.

The Dongzhou confrontation was a dramatic example of a trend that
deeply worries China's Communist rulers. In 1993, there were about
8,700 protests and other "mass incidents" in China. By last year, that
number had skyrocketed to 74,000. And the number of protests is
soaring despite China's rapid economic growth, which was supposed to
defuse the discontent and maintain the regime's stability.

If the social unrest continues to worsen, it could eventually threaten
the Communist regime and trigger a political tsunami. Authorities are
under heavy pressure to control the unrest, yet the protesters are
becoming tougher and more confrontational. Despite orders to avoid
bloodshed, the Chinese police are increasingly likely to resort to
violence as they struggle to control the demonstrations.

"There is increasing consensus that the form of protests is changing
in ways that Beijing will find harder to control," said Murray Scot
Tanner, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation in the
United States. He has extensively studied the trends in Chinese
protest activity.

"Police officials note that protests are growing larger in size and
that 'repetitive' or long-lasting protests are on the rise," Dr.
Tanner concluded in a report this year.

"Demonstrators are increasingly reaching across the old boundaries of
workplace and office unit, and their levels of organization, use of
communications technology and tactical cleverness is increasing. While
police insist that most protests are peaceful, they also report that
'confrontativeness' and violence are on the rise."

Eight years ago, the typical incident in China had 10 or fewer
protesters; by 2003, the average had topped 50 and an increasing
number of protests involved hundreds or thousands of people. In the
city of Guangzhou, in the same province as Dongzhou, one out of every
seven incidents involved more than 100 protesters.

While the protests are becoming bigger, they are also becoming more
violent and more intense. A survey of 87 recent conflicts between
farmers and police showed that more than 160 people were arrested in
the confrontations, while hundreds were injured and three killed. In a
dozen of those conflicts, riot police or special forces were involved.
In seven cases, armed police were deployed. Some of the protesting
farmers were even tied up and paraded through the streets.

"Local governments frequently resort to police force to deal with
farmers who have lost their land and are fighting for their rights,"
wrote Yu Jianrong, a researcher at Hebei University in China who
conducted the survey. "Enormous stakes are involved. . . . Once the
farmer struggle enters the stage of demanding rights for governance,
it may become a large-scale social political movement."

Behind all of this is a fundamental shift in China's political
culture, a shift with worrying consequences for the Communist
authorities. Scholars are debating whether the rising unrest could
some day trigger a "tipping point" in China's social stability.

"China's rapid economic growth, rising access to education and
information, and increasing exposure to notions of 'contracts' and
'rights' are apparently producing an increasingly assertive society,"
Dr. Tanner wrote.

"After 25 years of economic and political reforms, many average
Chinese citizens are simply more willing to take their demands into
the streets. . . . Many appear to have forgotten the bloody 'lesson'
that Deng Xiaoping administered in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre."

In a sign of the government's growing alarm, Beijing announced in
August that it was creating special police units in 36 cities to
suppress "riots."

One of the bloodiest clashes in recent years was a confrontation in
Hebei province between hundreds of protesting farmers and about 300
heavily armed thugs who were hired by local officials and land
developers.

Six farmers were killed by the thugs armed with shotguns, clubs, metal
pipes and knives. The farmers fought back with pitchforks and poles.
Yesterday, the government announced that a local Communist official
and 26 others would be put on trial for organizing the attack.

In a clash in April, sparked by pollution from a chemical factory in
Zhejiang province, thousands of villagers fought back against more
than 1,000 riot police, smashing their vehicles and putting 30
policemen in hospital. And in Sichuan last year, as many as 100,000
farmers fought against thousands of police in a dispute over farmland
seized for a hydro plant. Several people were killed and scores
injured.

Much of the bloodshed is due to a corrupt alliance between local
officials and business interests — a "power-money coalition," in the
words of Wu Guoguang, a former Chinese government adviser who is now a
political scientist at the University of Victoria.

"They certainly arouse more and more discontent," he said in an
interview. "When they find such protests unbearable, they use their
guns. This means that the increasing trend of protests will continue,
and the frequency of bloody crackdowns will also increase."

Hou Wenzhuo, a Chinese activist who heads the Empowerment and Rights
Institute, a human rights organization inside China, says the growing
protests are a result of rising economic inequality and a lack of
political rights. "Because of the lack of protection of their rights,
farmers are more willing to resort to desperate means," she said in an
interview. "Chinese society has evolved into something like Karl
Marx's society, where some of the powerful and wealthy class are
depriving the poor of the opportunity for justice or equality. This
leads to a violent confrontation or a sudden burst of people's anger,"
she said.

In the aftermath of the brutal killings in Dongzhou, the town remains
in a state of fear, sealed off from the outside world. Police are
still conducting raids and searches from house to house, seeking to
arrest the surviving protesters.

At 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, a week after the shootings, there was a
knock on the door of one village home. Eight policemen, including two
with guns, entered the home and grabbed the father of the family,
leading him away.

The next day, dozens of police returned to the home. They searched
every corner, confiscating a shovel and other farming tools.

"We have no way of fighting them," said the daughter of the arrested
man. She broke into sobs over the telephone. "Please help us get
justice," she begged.

Mr. Chen worries that the officials will dig up the coffin of his
brother-in-law and burn the body to destroy the evidence. "The town is
in a panic," he says. "We don't know what will happen next. Some
villagers depend on fishing, but they don't dare to go out because of
the police checks and roadblocks."

He remains at his family's home, trying to comfort his grieving
mother-in-law, who has fallen sick. Local officials have visited the
house, trying to placate the mourning family with vague words of
sympathy. "These words just make us more angry and sad," he says.
"Only a proper solution can comfort us, not these useless words."

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