Xue Jingbo

You know as bad as we may have it over here in the old U.S. of A., thank the deity of your choice that you don't live in China. Imagine this scenario:

The local officials, who have held appointed office for over thirty years, have decided to evict you and the rest of your fellow villagers from your humble pig farm so that they can sell the property to developers who will build luxury apartments for some of the new monied classes. You raise an outcry and decide to take the long trip to Beijing to petition the central government. With me so far?  Good. On the way to Beijing, you must unfortunately evade the police from your local district, whose job it is, is to keep you from ratting out the bosses and plan on kidnapping you and bringing you back home before you can beef. Let's say you manage to evade the cops, you still might very well get thrown in the Peking hoosegow for opening your yap and disturbing the natural tranquility and order of things.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time in the People's Republic. There is an evil cynicism and disregard for people that we can not even fathom in our cozy little democracy. Before the Olympics the government asked people to list their concerns and petition the authorities well ahead of the games so that there would be no disturbances or loss of face with the eyes of the world upon the country. Over one hundred people spoke up about their grievances. They were all promptly put in jail until after the games. Well hopefully they are out of jail by now. Pretty handy.

The newest news is from the small village of Wukan in Guangdong province.  A few months ago the Fengtian Livestock company and Country Garden, in concert with the local bosses and apparatchiks, decided to take over a bunch of land collectively owned by the villagers to build luxury villas and a seahorse farm. The villagers protested and demanded that the bosses open their books, wondering just what had happened to the money?. The mayor of the county, Qiu Jinxiong, asked the village to choose 13 representatives to negotiate over the land sales. A quiet and by all accounts, reasonable 42 year old man named Xue Jingbo was elected by the villagers to talk with the local authorities and try to come up with a solution. Xue was a butcher by trade and respected by the townspeople. Negotiations came to naught over several months and the local government branded the negotiating team as troublemakers and put them all on a wanted list.

Things started to turn bad very quickly. Xue was sitting outside a restaurant last Friday with four friends, snatched up by a group of plain clothes men and bundled into a van without license plates. They threw a rope over him, tied him up and dragged him away.

The family tried to call the authorities for two days and find out Xue's whereabouts. Finally his family were  told that the man had died of a heart attack. They went to the morgue and were surrounded by about forty policemen who would not let them take any pictures. It appeared that the body had been badly beaten.

"They told us he died from a cardiac arrest. But that is not true. He has never had heart disease," said a family member who asked to remain anonymous. "There were bruises on his hands, feet and forehead. We believe he was beaten to death."

Miss Xue said her father's body was covered in bruises and cuts. Both his nostrils were caked with blood. His thumbs were bent and twisted backwards. A large bruise on his back suggested he had been kicked from behind. And the clean state of his clothes suggested to the family that he may have been stripped first, and then tortured.
"When we came out, there were two rows of riot police, around 50 of them, and a dozen police cars. We pleaded for his body but they refused, saying it might inflame the village. It is still lying there in the morgue," she said. 

The body has still not been returned. The village is in an uproar. Hundreds of police with water cannons have stormed the protest, firing water cannons and beating the protesters with batons. The local officials have fled. The village is under siege, and 1,000 armed officers failed to retake the town Sunday with no food or water allowed in, and no villagers allowed to leave. The villagers think that they have enough food and water to last perhaps ten more days.

On Wednesday, a local official said the property development project that sparked the Wukan unrest was being put on hold for now, even as he vowed to "strike hard" against leaders of the village revolt. There has so far been little sign that villagers will back down, though many residents of the areas around Wukan see little chance of the small fishing village of 20,000 people standing up to a heavily armed police presence for long.

Our country may not be perfect but at least we don't live in China. Life is very cheap there for the common man. The central government is censoring the whole issue, on the blogs and in the newspapers, fearing that unrest will spread. I got on the Beijing People's Daily today and didn't find a thing. These kind of protests are becoming more and more common in the rapidly changing China. One expert pegs the number of "incidents" last year at 180,000. One hopes that the people in the authoritarian country will one day throw off the yoke of oppression 革 and gain the basic human freedoms that most of us take for granted.