>>Chinese protest ends at dawn with screams, death
By Emma Graham-Harrison
Reuters
Thursday, June 16, 2005; 2:30 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - Armed with pipes and shovels and wearing hard hats, the Chinese toughs shouted "charge" and waded into a throng of squatting farmers fighting to retain their land.
The skirmish lasts a few minutes and leaves at least one man down, an attacker flailing at his limp body with a pole, according to video footage obtained by the Washington Post of the clash in China's northern province of Hebei surrounding the capital, Beijing.
Moments later a bright explosion and what appear to be gunshots mark the start of a second charge. Screams and shouts of "Run!" and the villagers' stand crumbles.
The last shot ends frozen, the camera tilted to one side.
The footage, which the Post said was given to it by farmers, highlights one of a growing number of disputes over land rights in China, where protests take place daily and the top leadership places an overriding emphasis on the need for social stability.
About 58,000 protests took place across the country in 2003, according to a report in the Communist Party-backed magazine Outlook. The state-controlled media are barred from freely reporting on many protests, and details are often hard to come by. Video footage of a violent protest is rarer still.
Six villagers were killed and 48 injured, eight of them seriously, in the clash in Hebei's Shengyou village on Saturday, said the Beijing News, a state-sanctioned newspaper known to push the envelope in reporting. One of the attackers also died in the clashes.
The mayor and party secretary of Dingzhou city, where the village is located, were sacked.
China's leaders fear such protests might spiral out of control or, worse, channel anger over growing social inequality at the Communist Party, which has monopolized power since winning the Chinese civil war in 1949.
Many of the protests are by villagers angry that their land has been wrested away from them without adequate compensation, signed over by local government officials to businesses for development.
The villagers of Shengyou, 220 km (140 miles) southwest of Beijing, were in a dispute with local officials over their land to be used by a state-owned power plant, the Beijing News said.
Since 2003, the villagers have refused compensation from the firm, Hebei Guohua Power, which plans to build a storage facility for coal cinder on the land, the newspaper said. They have been squatting on the property, living in tents, ever since.
HARD HATS
Tensions heightened in April when 20 youths attacked the villagers in the middle of the night to try to force them off the land, the Beijing News said. Villagers captured one man, Zhu Xiaorui, 23, who said he had been paid 100 yuan ($12) to beat people up, it said. He did not say who had paid him.
The villagers had held him in shackles since. The Washington Post reported that Zhu appeared frightened but healthy and said the villagers had treated him kindly.
Then came Saturday's attack near dawn. Scores of men, some wearing army fatigues and construction hard hats, charged in swinging poles, shovels and hoes at the villagers.
They surged across between makeshift tents as some villagers hurled stones or clods of earth. Bangs like gunshots or firecrackers can be heard in the video.
About two minutes into the footage, there is a bright explosion, followed by what sound like more gunshots. Villagers flee as the camp is overrun.
The villager who shot the footage suffered a broken arm in the fighting, the Post said.
The provincial chief of police and forensic experts went to the area on Wednesday to negotiate with the villagers and perform autopsies, it said.
The villagers agreed to release Zhu after meeting the newly appointed party secretary of Dingzhou, who offered relatives 50,000 yuan for each of those killed, it said.
The tensions in Shengyou are playing out in many parts of China. On Thursday, villagers in a northern Beijing suburb blocked a road leading to their land, which they say has been taken unfairly from them to build an Olympic venue.
So far, the events unfolding in that village have yet to explode into violence.
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