-Caveat Lector-
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To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 07:18:23 -0500
Subject: Re: [PoliticalGroup] Chinese Raid Defiant Village, Killing 2,
Amid Rural Unrest
April 20, 2001
Chinese Raid Defiant Village, Killing 2, Amid
Rural Unrest
By ERIK ECKHOLM
[Y]UNTANG, China, April 18 — Before dawn last
Sunday, more than 600 police and paramilitary
troops stormed this village in southern China and
opened fire on a gathering crowd of unarmed
farmers, killing 2 and wounding at least 18,
witnesses and local officials say.
The shootings, which have not been reported in
the Chinese news media, were one of the most
severe known incidents of civil strife in recent
years, the latest act in a three- year struggle
pitting the 1,400 residents of Yuntang against
township and county officials. The villagers have
refused to pay what they call illegal and
impossibly high local taxes and fees, and the
officials have labeled the villagers a "criminal
gang."
As a tangible sign of their resistance, the
villagers erected a strong iron gate across the
only road into Yuntang last year, keeping it
locked and guarded to prevent the entry of
official vehicles.
The bitter strife in this village and untold
others reflects the anger and despair among the
millions of farm families in China's traditional
breadbasket region. Even as the national economy
booms, in villages across central and southern
China incomes have stagnated, most young people
migrate to coastal cities to perform menial jobs,
and local governments are so short of money that
officials and teachers often go unpaid for months
at a time.
The use of gunfire against unarmed, protesting
citizens has been rare in recent years and
Sunday's hushed-up clash is a sharp reminder of
the domestic pressures bearing down on the
country's leaders and the Communist Party as they
try to modernize China without losing control of
it.
The shooting in Yuntang — with its echoes of the
unresolved national trauma of the 1989 shooting
of hundreds of demonstrators around Tiananmen
Square — stemmed in part from the economic
strains that are bound to grow as China joins the
World Trade Organization and opens up industries
and agriculture.
The people of Yuntang remain defiant but also
fearful of further reprisals, and when a foreign
reporter unexpectedly arrived, he was quickly
told to leave. One older man apologized, saying,
"If the Communist regime knows we are meeting the
foreign press, they might level our village."
The authorities of Jiangxi Province, where this
rice-farming village of the lower Yangtze basin
lies, have managed to largely suppress news of
the killings. Still, villagers say the
authorities apparently recognized the potentially
explosive nature of the news because the evening
of the incident a provincial deputy Communist
Party secretary was dispatched to the village,
and he promised an investigation.
The deadly clash in Yuntang is the latest sign of
instability in Jiangxi, a relatively poor
province known as a cradle of Mao's Communist
revolution. Another county not far from Yuntang
was the site of another major, internationally
publicized conflict last August, when more than
10,000 farmers protesting high taxes rampaged
through township offices and the homes of
officials. There is no sign that farmers from the
two restless counties have joined forces, forming
the kind of rural movement that the authorities
are especially anxious to prevent.
And Jiangxi Province's top two officials were
replaced after a deadly explosion in March at a
primary school where, local residents said,
students had been forced to make fireworks. In
that case, which aroused popular suspicion and
anger, local authorities apparently misled
leaders in Beijing about activities at the
school. While Prime Minister Zhu Rongji did not
publicly rebut the official account that the
explosion was the work of a madman, he did issue
a highly unusual public apology for the accident.
The Yuntang shootings fly in the face of a
warning issued by the prime minister to local
authorities in a 1999 speech. Discussing the wide
concern over rural tax burdens, Mr. Zhu publicly
admonished officials to respond with
understanding rather than force.
The provincial authorities apparently face a
quandary: should they praise the officials of
Yujiang County and Zhongtong township for
safeguarding public order, or should they fire
those who planned this attack, or even punish
some for murder? Officials must also decide
whether to press charges against Su Guosheng, a
village leader who had dared to take complaints
about local corruption and excess taxes all the
way to Beijing and, villagers said, was detained
the day before the raid.
The villagers are still waiting for answers and
have kept a pile of empty shell casings as well
as the bodies of the two dead men, Yu Xinguang,
38, and Yu Xinquan, 22, as potential evidence.
They say they have not heard back from the
detained Mr. Su, and fear he will be beaten to
death in police custody.
Resentment against rising taxes and official
corruption had been building for years, but the
ire of the once-glorified peasantry of Yuntang
erupted in 1998. That year, despite vast flooding
of the Yangtze River basin that wiped out their
crops, local taxes and fees were actually raised
by nearly one-third, to $36 per one-seventh acre
of cropland.
Even in normal years, that would be a high burden
for families here, who each control little more
than half an acre of rice paddy and at best reap
a meager profit. They refused to pay.
This week, putting their case to a visitor, they
showed the line of those 1998 floodwaters, some
eight feet up the walls of their homes. In 1999,
farm taxes were increased yet again and the
farmers were told they must pay their arrears
from 1998 as well. They refused, again, to pay.
"There are corrupt officials at every level —
township, county and city — and they have been
collaborating to get more for themselves," said
one farmer this week.
In February 1999, four truckloads of police
officers and officials tried to enter the village
but were repelled by an angry crowd, the
villagers said. In October that year, three
villagers who were working in the nearby city of
Yingtan were arrested; villagers said they forced
their release by blocking a highway and
surrounding the car of the Yingtan mayor.
Last July, they said, some 600 police officers
tried to force their way into the village, but
were repelled again by a defiant wall of people.
This month, local officials apparently decided to
use the new national "strike hard" campaign
against crime and break the village's resistance
once and for all.
On Saturday they arrested Mr. Su, considered a
ringleader. On Sunday at 4 a.m., at least 600
officers of the local police and the People's
Armed Police, an anti-riot force affiliated with
the army, arrived at the village edge in trucks
and vans. The officers had been told that all of
Yuntang village was a "criminal gang," witnesses
later said.
Armed with rifles, pistols and electric prods,
the officers ran around the roadblock and started
breaking into homes, waking the rest of the
village. In front of the primary school, the
officers confronted a crowd of hundreds,
according to witnesses, and at 4:20 a.m. they
opened fire. By some accounts, they began by
firing low, at the legs, but when farmers started
fighting back with rocks and sticks, they shot to
kill.
Two men died and a third was paralyzed, and a
total of 18 wounded villagers are now recovering
in two local hospitals.
The deaths were confirmed by a township official,
who added, shaking his head, "Those taxes in 1998
were too high."
The police occupied the village for the day,
detaining three more people but releasing them
later.
Now the residents of Yuntang feel they are living
in a virtual state of siege, with the police
watching their roadway, two dead men in a back
room and a respected comrade in jail. They await
the decisions of the provincial government, and
have sneaked out a written plea for attention
from higher authorities in Beijing.
This winter Prime Minister Zhu pledged to reduce
the crushing tax burdens on farmers, proposing to
expand on pilot projects in Anhui Province in
which all extra fees were abolished and farmers
pay a single tax, with total tax burdens
considerably reduced.
The idea is popular, but no one has yet answered
the obvious problem it poses: how to make up the
enormous shortfall in funds for local government,
which, corrupt practices aside, must also build
roads and schools and pay teachers and the
police.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company |
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