ESWN translates an article from the Sun about Foshan city, Guangdong, where villagers have taken over the village committee building for over two months:
Earlier this month, the village party secretary who had been the target of criticisms resigned. The town government sent in three cadres to take over government work in the village. As a result, the villagers calmed down somewhat and the demonstrations eased up. But on the night before last, villagers found some village officials moving stuff out of the village committee office building. They stopped the men and asked to inspect the stuff. At first, the village officials claimed that the boxes contained moon cakes. When the villagers opened the boxes by force, they found out that these were the operating account books for the village committee over the last dozen years. The books showed that there had been almost 100 million yuan in revenue that the villagers had never heard of. Therefore, the villagers took possession of these account books.
In order to stop the village officials from destroying the evidence, more than one thousand villagers surrounded the village committee office building. Some of the villagers even blocked the highway in order to draw the attention of senior Guangdong and central government officials to investigate the case. [Full text]
[Image: Hundreds of villagers have signed a petition to demand
access to the village accounts, via ESWN]
