[Lu Yeqin, Villager]:
“Officials from the village sold land. This land originally belonged to the villagers. After it was sold, the [villagers] were not given any money for it. The villagers are upset, and after all, this land was passed down through their family business. They rely on the land for their livelihood, but now it has been sold.”

Police did not stop more than 3000 villagers from marching to the village committee, but neither have the villagers received a response from local officials.

Local resident Mrs. Ma says the turnout has been huge.

[Mrs. Ma, Villager]:
“Everyone from the village came out. Today we will march again, and the whole village should come. I have even seen kids coming out, passing by my building.”

The Chinese blogosphere is buzzing with chatter about the demonstrations in Panhe East and West, where tensions between local residents and officials have followed a Wukan-like trajectory. From Tea Leaf Nation, which also posted images that had surfaced on Sina Weibo yesterday:

As reported on the Internet portal China.com, the Panhe Village Committee spent the last several years selling off piece after piece of Panhe’s land, all without the villagers’ knowledge. On June 11, 2011, a Wenzhou copper company brought thugs and local police as it began to mine pieces of ancestral land, leading to a confrontation that saw villagers injured, including women and the elderly. The report further states that after villagers’ attempts to report the matter were ignored, they retaliated on October 16, 2011 by attacking the property of another local company. In response, the report continues, the local government arrested nine villagers, two of whom are still in custody.

World Journal, a popular Chinese-language newspaper in North America, reports that government officials and police fled the small village of approximately 5,000 in October of last year following a violent confrontation with villagers in which more than ten were arrested. The reports agree that villagers’ demands for compensation were substantially ignored by authorities.

According to World Journal, the Wukan uprising’s ultimate success inspired Panhe villagers to decide to hold widespread demonstrations starting February 1.  Since that time, the report continues, demonstrators have circled the village unmolested. The street demonstrations shown in photographic accounts include demonstrators waving banners with slogans such as, “Denounce the Local Panhe Government’s Deceit Of The Masses,” “Down With Corrupt Officials,” and “Reselling Land And Destroying Fertile Farmland Is A Heinous Crime.”

See also CDT coverage of a new survey in which 43% of farmers reported being victims of land grabs. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Elizabeth Economy wrote Tuesday that “more Wukans are on China’s horizon” unless China creates a real system of official accountability or enforces the rule of law.

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Post tags: chinese communist party, corruption, Guangdong, land grab protests, Panhe, sina weibo, social media, Wukan, Zhejiang
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“The nationwide survey, which will provide basic data for China’s Gini coefficient calculation, will cover about 140,000 urban and rural households, and the gathering and use of data will conform to international standards,” Xie Hongguang, deputy chief of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said.

The integrated urban-rural income data is scheduled to be published in 2013 to pave the way for the publication of a national Gini coefficient that can measure income inequality, Xie said ….

Yi Xianrong, a researcher with the Institute of Finance and Banking under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that the government introduce regulations to ensure the transparency of income information.

“The public have a right to know the Gini coefficient,” Yi said.

Last year’s NBS figures put China’s rural Gini coefficient at 0.39, just short of the 0.4 mark widely held to show potentially destabilising inequality. But the article also cites the World Bank’s 2009 estimate of 0.47 for the country as a whole. See explanations of the Gini coefficient from the World Bank and Wikipedia, and the latter’s global comparison, from Sweden and Norway in the 0.20s to Namibia at over 0.7.

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Post tags: economic inequality, income inequality, inequality, National Bureau of Statistics, urban rural divide, World Bank
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According to the study, conducted in 17 provinces and regions by Beijing’s Renmin University and published in the 21st Century Business Herald, nearly a quarter of farmers did not receive any compensation for their land.

Almost two thirds of those surveyed who did receive compensation got a lump sum, which averaged 18,739 yuan ($3,000) per mu, a Chinese unit of land equivalent to 0.16 acres or 0.07 hectares, according to the study.

This compares to an average land sale price of 778,000 yuan per mu for local governments — or more than 40 times the average compensation sum given to farmers. The others received their money in installments.

On a visit to the southern manufacturing hub of Guangdong over the weekend, Wen reiterated his concern over land grabs.

Read more about land rights in China via CDT.

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Post tags: farmers, forced evictions, land grab, land rights, rural development
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Wednesday’s voting will result in the selection of an independent election committee to supervise upcoming rounds of voting for villagers’ representatives and a new village committee, according to election procedures.

Eleven villagers who will make up the election committee will not be permitted to run for the village committee.

“This is to ensure fairness in the coming village committee election,” said Lin Zulian, the village’s Communist Party of China (CPC) secretary. Lin was appointed secretary following last year’s protests.

The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, the first foreign reporter to breach the December police blockade of Wukan and report from within the village, reported today that the election went smoothly other than a “small scuffle at the beginning over access for Hong Kong journalists.” Even though today’s vote only serves as the prelude to the main election in March, its symbolism was evident:

“We had to make a big thing, a big show, out of it to underline its importance and to guarantee that it was all fair and transparent,” said Yang Semao, one of the chief organisers.

“Wukan has been in the dark for so many years; its elections always manipulated. It is the first time we have done this so we want to do a good job,” he added. In the past few days, several academics and students have also arrived in Wukan, partly to observe the proceedings, and partly to offer advice to the villagers.

“This is very meaningful,” said Chen Liangshan, 61, who used to work in one of the village’s temples. “I have already got the list of people I will vote for in my mind. I am glad to get the chance to choose people who will actually do something. This is the first time we have ever seen a ballot and we are excited about it.”

Mr Chen filled in his ballot, a sheet of A4 paper, at a table covered by a bright red tablecloth and deposited it in one of seven shiny aluminium ballot boxes. According to an official press release, he was one of 7688 eligible voters, with 1043 voting by proxy.

Villagers believe the election is China’s first fully transparent and democratic vote, Moore wrote yesterday, though Voice of America reported skepticism from some that corrupt officials would ultimately regain power. Today represents “a small step towards grassroots rights,” according to Reuters:

At the end of polling, villagers burned unused ballot papers and clapped in jubilation at a largely orderly and trouble-free poll with turnout well over 80 percent.

“This far exceeded our expectations,” said Yang Semao, a village elder who helped officiate. “It shows our passion for democracy.”

Earlier, Xue Jianwan, daughter of village protest organizer Xue Jinbo, who died in police custody last year sparking further protests, visited her father’s memorial in the village square before voting. His body, which family members said bore marks of torture, has yet to be returned by authorities.

“This is something my father would have hoped for,” she said, bursting into tears after casting her ballot. “We just want to do our best to fulfill his final wishes.”

BBC News published a brief photo series with several shots from today’s election, including one of newly-installed village chief Lin Zulian, a leader of the protest movement who has taken charge of organizing the elections. The voting “marked the peaceful denouement” of the December standoff between villagers and armed police, according to the New York Times, which reported differing expectations among two Chinese observers:

Li Fan, an election expert at the World and China Institute in Beijing, thought the best one could hope for was an uncompromised election in Wukan. “It should be better given that all the media is watching,” he said. “If it is a good election, that will be unusual for China.”

But Lin Jiang, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, said he hoped that the once-belligerent fishing village could serve as a high-profile counterpoint to those who argue that democracy is ill-suited for China’s rural citizenry. “Peasants in China may be undereducated but the election in Wukan shows that just because you don’t have a good education, doesn’t mean you can’t elect officials to represent your interests,” he said.

One expert called today’s election a “paradigm shift” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. While the Chinese government censored nearly all information from the Internet amid the protests in December, The WSJ’s China Real Time Report noted the “unusually open-and borderline euphoric” dialogue about Wukan now permeating the Chinese blogosphere:

“This is a model,” Chinese real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang said Wednesday via the popular microblogging service Sina Weibo, where searches for Wukan were producing nearly a million posts.

“The start of something new,” observed another user of the service.

…

For many, the election brought to mind one of Mao Zedong’s favorite revolutionary slogans/sayings: “If you want freedom and democracy, you have to fight for it yourself,” wrote one Internet user in the popular discussion forum Maoyan Kanren. “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Others saw in the elections a rebuke of people, like martial-arts star Jackie Chan, who’ve questioned whether Chinese culture is compatible with democratic government.

“After this, whoever says Chinese people aren’t good enough for democracy, I’ll sue the bastard,” one particularly excited blogger promised on Sina Weibo.

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Post tags: corruption, democracy, Jackie Chan, land grab, Lin Zuluan, microblogging, online public opinion, protests, sina weibo, village elections, Wukan, Xue Jinbo
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A January 27 blog post on Wukan made by lawyer Yuan Yulai (袁裕来) to his blog on the Caixin Media platform was deleted by internet censors. Yuan followed up the same day by posting news of the deletion on Sina Weibo. Including an image file for the post (below), he wrote: “Is there no hope for the Wukan incident? Are leaders now setting the tone? (Why was this deleted? Is this still propaganda policy?)”

Yuan Yulai’s microblog post was also subsequently deleted. But the text-as-image file he posted on Sina Weibo, which we archived, is pasted below. In the file Yuan shares an account of words spoken by an unnamed senior leader at a recent meeting on stability preservation, the mobilization of domestic security forces to combat social unrest:

A certain leader said in an internal address at the CCP Work Conference on Politics, Law and Stability Preservation: Right now there are tens of thousands of mass incidents [in China each year], mostly happening in rural townships and villages and remote regions, the causes being principally economic. These are convenient for us to independently resolve or break up. But if these spread to coastal cities and are transformed into political demands, the result would be unimaginable. Some comrades lack a real sense of the dangers involved, thinking we are over-reacting. It would be better for a clear directive from the central authorities to over-react than to fall short [of what is needed].

. . . The Wukan incident is far from finished. Can challenges to the leadership status of the Chinese Communist Party evade retribution? That is a page we cannot open, that no one dares open.

Residents of Wukan will vote on Wednesday to select members of a committee to supervise the election of village representatives, expected to take place in February, after an investigative team declared previous elections invalid following the protests. The Financial Times reported on Monday that Wukan offers a potential model for democracy in China, and its experiment will likely have a major impact on the political ambitions of Guangdong party chief Wang Yang:

This lengthy process is designed to prevent the monopoly on power enjoyed by the erstwhile village governor, Mr Xue. “The good thing is Wukan people know exactly what they want. They haven’t been lured by people buying votes. They are focusing on the long term,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian.

There is, nevertheless, plenty of scope for things to go wrong as the new representatives will have to deal with difficult issues such as returning land to villagers and an investigation into the death in police custody in December of a popular village leader. This would likely require punishment of party officials. “Nothing has changed. We have to see if the election process will be able to resolve our complaints,” says one of the more impatient leaders of the December protests.

Meanwhile, one well-connected member of the CPPCC advisory body summed up Mr Wang’s risky endeavour in harsh terms: “If the results are not great, his political career could be over.”

See also previous CDT coverage of the Wukan incident and analysis published in its aftermath (in reverse chronological order):

- South China Protests: Not So Subversive?

- Land Grabs: Why Take The Risk?

- Wukan Protest Leader Named Party Chief

- Wang Zhanyang on Wukan and Village Autonomy

- Wukan and the Rule of Law

- The Third Wheel: China’s Legal System

- Wu Si on Wukan and Civil Rights

- Hu Deping on Wukan and Land Rights

- “Wukan” on Sina Weibo: Unblocked as Protest Postponed (Update)

- Government Backs Down to Wukan Villagers

- More Protests in Guangdong as Wukan Delays March (Updated)

- Organized Wukan Villagers Plan Next Steps

- With Roadblock Strengthening, Wukan Remains Defiant

- Netizens Show Support for Wukan Revolt

- Wukan Honors Martyr Amid Siege

- Wukan Rejects Ransom, Siege Continues (Updated)

- Villager dies, Wukan Under Siege (Updated)

- Land Grab Protest in S. China Simmers for 4th day

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Post tags: chinese communist party, democracy, Guangdong, land grabs, mass incidents, village elections, Wang Y ang, Wukan
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For 10-year-old student Xie Xiaoyuan, just getting to school is an ordeal. On a recent day, her frostbitten ears are testament to just how difficult the trip is.

“I get up at five o’clock,” she says, “then I comb my hair and start walking.”

Xie navigates a mountain path in China’s remote Shaanxi province in the dark, trudging through snowstorms and mudslides. Then she has to get a bus for about 10 miles. She hasn’t time to eat breakfast.

“For lunch, I spend 15 cents on two pieces of bread and a drink,” she says.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch — or so the economic theory goes. But that’s no longer the case for Xie and the 25,000 poverty-stricken children in China who now receive a free meal, thanks to the “Free Lunch for Children” charity campaign set up by a Chinese journalist.

Indirectly, his efforts have led to the government announcing it will provide nutritional support for 26 million of China’s poorest children every day.

While childhood obesity expands in China’s cities, China Daily reported last year on “chronically underfed” children in poor rural areas. One post at Ministry of Tofu showed a group of rural children on their long and perilous daily trudge to fetch water in drought-hit Sichuan, while another used images of empty chairs to vividly illustrate the lives of families split by economic migration.

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Post tags: food supply, nutrition, poverty, poverty alleviation, rural children, rural education, schools, Shaanxi
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As year-end reports on 2011 emerge from companies and organizations around the world, an astonishing picture is building of extravagant, high-end Chinese spending that offers a glaring contrast to the hardscrabble, high-saving image of most Chinese.

Wealthy Chinese are snapping up gold, Rolls-Royces and yachts, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci faster than ever before, with increases registering not in baby steps, as a decade ago, but in giant leaps — 20, 50, even 80 percent, year on year. The Chinese have become the world’s biggest duty-free shoppers.

Where is all the money coming from?

Tantalizing research by Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute at the independent China Reform Foundation, based in Beijing, may offer a kind of Kepler telescope for viewing the economy at something like its true size.

Read more about wealth and poverty in China and the wealth gap through our special feature The Great Divide.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: gray economy, luxury, statistics, wealth, wealth gap
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Chinese authorities shot dead as many as five Tibetans and seriously wounded 40 others on Tuesday in the second day of bloodshed as protests escalated in the troubled Kardze (in Chinese, Ganzi) prefecture in Sichuan province, local sources said.

A crackdown has been launched in Serthar (in Chinese, Seda) county where the incident occurred, with about 40 protesters arrested and all public movements limited, the sources said.

“A kind of martial law has been imposed,” a local resident, calling himself Ganta, told RFA.

“Tibetans are confined to their homes as the Chinese police fire on anyone who ventures outside in the streets,” another local source said.

Meanwhile, reports conflict about how many people were killed in yesterday’s shooting, though Xinhua has acknowledged one death. From AP:

The official Xinhua News Agency cited a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying Tuesday that one Tibetan was killed and four others injured during Monday’s clash in Luhuo county in southwest China. Hong Lei says order has been restored in the region and that the authorities will act firmly to fight crime.

Witnesses and activist groups said security forces opened fire on protesters and killed as many as three people after several thousand Tibetans marched to government offices.

The International Campaign for Tibet says that three people were killed and provides background on the causes of the protests:

The escalating crackdown in Drango follows the circulation of leaflets in the area saying that Tibetans should not celebrate the New Year in 2012 because of the self-immolations, and declaring an intention by the unnamed author of the leaflets to set fire to themselves at the time of Tibetan New Year (Losar, which falls on February 22).

[...] Tibetans gathered in Drango (Chinese: Luhuo) county town in Kardze (Chinese: Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, at around 12 noon-2 pm today (January 23) following a buildup of tensions in the area. According to Tibetan exile sources in contact with Tibetans in the area, the local authorities tightened control in the area after the dissemination of leaflets. Although full details of circumstances leading up to the protest are not known, several sources said that police had adopted harsh measures to counter the impact of the leaflets, and that this has led to people from the three main nomadic areas of Drango gathering in the town. Tibetans shouted slogans calling for freedom and saying that they could not live under Chinese rule in Tibet.

[...] According to the same sources, when news spread of the protest, Tibetans began to converge upon Drango from different areas including Serthar and Lithang (Chinese: Litang), also in Kardze. There are serious fears of further escalation and military buildup, and concerns for the safety of monks at Drango monastery (the name means literally ‘head of the rock’). Drango is one of the most important and largest monasteries in Kham, situated on a mountain slope at the confluence of two rivers, around 25 kilometers from Kardze town.

Kathleen McLaughlin of Global Post comments on how difficult it is for foreign correspondents to get accurate information about such incidents in Tibetan regions:

And herein lies the crucial problem with reporting on Tibet and getting accruate information. Chinese journalists are constrained by censorship and state-owned media rules. Foreign correspondents require special permits to enter Tibet proper. In cases like this reported violence in a Tibetan area of Sichuan province, journalists are certain to be barred, detained and turned away from reporting on the scene. So how does one verify the facts of what happened in what was certainly a violent outburst in Tibetan parts of Sichuan province?

Many rely on Tibetan groups based outside of China and what contacts they can collect from within the country. China then puts forth its own version of the story. But most often happens, the real truth of events remains clouded in shadows, without independent verification.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: kardze, police violence, Tibet protests
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What a course it has been, as the record speaks for itself. Since 1978, China’s economy has grown more than 100-fold, while per capita GDP has risen roughly 80 times (not adjusted for inflation or exchange rate differences). It has far exceeded Deng’s expectation of reaching a per capita GDP of $4,000 by mid-21st century–a milestone that was achieved forty years ahead of schedule. China’s steel output is now north of 600 million tons, an incredible feat considering that the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s mobilized nearly 100 million Chinese only to end up with 11 million tons of steel.

I recount this snapshot of history on the anniversary of the southern tour not for its own sake, but because I believe it is instructive for observing China today. As China proceeds through a political transition, culminating in the new 18th Party Congress this fall, there are echoes of 1992. The Jasmine Revolution, Arab Spring, Wukan violence, increasing civil disobedience, and pluralism on social media, are new manifestations of peaceful evolution, as Hu Jintao’s culture essay elliptically warned against. The unusually public campaigns for political office–primarily construed as a two-way contest between Bo Xilai and Wang Yang–appear to be fundamentally about a referendum on the direction of reforms.

…

The political status quo in 2012, unlike the early 1990s, isn’t resigned to narrow ideological trench warfare. Rather, it is about monied elites who are largely concerned with enriching themselves and those in their circles, exacerbating inequality in a country that has yet to create a broad-based middle class. But just as China requires the equivalent of an LBJ-like “great society” transformation, forces are arrayed against it, leading to wayward and dispirited reforms.

What’s more, the great helmsman Deng Xiaoping is no longer around to right the course. A new political consensus will have to be forged by a new cohort of leaders. Whether they can coalesce around a social agenda as ambitious and transformative as Deng’s and inject energy into flagging reforms are ever more pertinent questions. They will get an opportunity come this fall–to complete Deng’s unfinished business of heralding sociopolitical change for the sake of nation building.

Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College, on the other hand, wonders why China bothers to remember Deng’s southern tour given the irony that pro-market economic reform in China does not exist. From The Financial Times:

Evidence of the demise of economic reform is easy to spot. The Chinese state has reasserted its control over the economy. Big state-owned enterprises dominate nearly all the critical sectors, such as banking, finance, transport, energy, natural resources and heavy industry. The private sector, a victim of persistent official discrimination, is in full retreat. Critical prices, such as interest rates and land, are officially controlled and severely distorted. Foreign businesses, once welcomed with open arms, are getting squeezed with protectionist measures. The overall orientation of the Chinese economy has veered so much off the reformist path that foreign business leaders who have long been supportive of China are now voicing their bitter disappointments, some publicly. China’s main western trading partners do not need to read scholarly analysis to know that there is no pulse in its reform. All they need to do is to listen to their business community, check their trade statistics with China, and take a look at Chinese economic policy.

A China Daily commentary by Chi Fulin of the Hainan-based China Institute of Reform and Development also notes the need for reform:

Deng’s confirmation of reforms aimed at facilitating the establishment of a socialist market economy released a vitality that has propelled the fast and long-term development of the country. Deng’s remarks enabled the country to embark on a socialist market economic road and it has taken the perfection of such a market as its supreme target.

The reform and opening-up policy has enabled some regions and some people to get rich earlier than others, which has led to powerful groups with vested interests. To maintain their established interests, these groups have become a barrier to further reforms, which has resulted in the interests of some middle and low-income people being marginalized, fermenting social discontent.

China should wholeheartedly endeavor to overcome this barrier so that it can realize Deng’s vision of common prosperity . This will help the fast-growing nation release its huge consumption potential and lay a solid foundation for its sustainable and rapid development in the years ahead.

China’s economic and social development now requires a social transformation and reforms targeted at equality and sustainable development. To facilitate this, the country should embrace a consumption-driven, green and market-regulated development model, prioritize increasing people’s wealth and push for government transformation. To this end, China should push forward overall reforms of its economic and social institutions as well as governance changes during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) period. While giving the market a full role in the distribution of resources, the country should step up the establishment of a public service system and a service-oriented government. A systematic foundation should also be laid for the expansion of domestic demand and the establishment of social justice and sustainable development.

See also a Global Times editorial discussing Deng Xiaoping and the need for a steady and unified course of political reform.

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Post tags: CCP 5th generation, Deng Xiaoping, economic reform, ideology, leadership transition, political reform, southern tour
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The farmers tried to keep the contract secret — Yen Hongchang hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house — but when they returned to the fields, everything was different.

Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.

“We all secretly competed,” says Yen Jingchang. “Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.”

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economic reform, rural reform, Xiaogang
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