More than 1,000 villagers in Inner Mongolia took the local Communist Party chief hostage Thursday in the latest land dispute to rock the Chinese countryside.
Amid signs of division in the government about how to handle rural unrest, the residents of Qianjin village have also driven off hundreds of armed police and blocked construction of a motorway they claim is being built through their crops and homes without adequate compensation.
"About 2,000 protesters have surrounded the local government office," a resident, who declined to give her name, told the reporters by telephone. "They are holding the general secretary and another official."
Another resident, a middle-aged man who gave his surname as Zhang, said this was the first time the village had been in conflict with the police.
"We only want our land and fairness," he said.
The villagers in one of China's poorest provinces say they had been paid only a fraction of the 9,900 yuan (US$1,200) they were promised for each of the 180 mu (about 667 square meters) of land requisitioned for the motorway.
In protest, they halted the work by occupying the building site and seizing construction equipment. Last week, they repelled more than 100 police who had been sent in to empty the site and arrest the ringleaders in a six-hour clash.
"The entire village is in a state of anarchy," Han Guowu, the district chief, told reporters. "Please trust the party and the government," he said. But such pleas are falling on deaf ears as more and more Chinese peasants take matters into their own hands.
The protest in Qianjin is at least the third since April in which locals have fought, and -- at least temporarily -- beaten public security forces.
In June, six peasants were killed in Shengyou, Hebei Province, during a battle with thugs employed by a power company to force them off their land. The government recognized the validity of their dispute, sacked the mayor and promised the villagers that they could keep their property.
Two months earlier, the residents of Huankantou, in Zhejiang Province, fought off more than 1,000 riot police during a protest over a chemical plant.
Countless other demonstrations go unreported. According to the Ta Kung-Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper funded by the government, 3.76 million people took part in 74,000 protests last year.
They are a symptom of China's growing pains as the one-party political system struggles to keep pace with a super-charged economy.
In many areas, public suspicions about official corruption have been rising along with personal expectations that are often left unfulfilled.
The government's response has been mixed. Earlier this month, vice-minister Chen Xiwen condoned the protests as a sign of growing "democratic awareness" among farmers.
In an ominous editorial yesterday, however, the People's Daily warned that any threat to stability would be crushed.
"Destabilizing factors must be resolved at the grassroots and nipped in the bud," the Communist Party organ said.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS