Revolution Watch / China

[Updated; Scroll down.]

If the military and the peasantry unite as one, then none on this earth could possibly subvert them.

–MaoRural uprisings in China are becoming so frequent, it’s getting hard to keep track of them.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has sealed off a village in southern Guangdong province after days of protests over land grabs ended at the weekend in clashes with police that killed a teenage girl, two residents said on Monday.

Last week’s protest came a month after police sent to quell a similar demonstration in another part of Guangdong opened fire, killing at least three people and as many as 20. “They’ve blocked all the roads leading to the village and they searched our bodies and motorcycles,” a man surnamed Yang at Panlong village in Sanjiao township told Reuters by phone. “We are not allowed to leave after dusk.”

Residents said police used electric batons, or cattle prods, when they tried to disperse a crowd of several hundred protesting against low compensation for their confiscated land. “They turned off all the street lights and car lights before beating whoever they caught,” a villager surnamed Xu said by phone. “That includes the girl — she was just 13 and she died.”

Can we now assume that the Communist Party of China has lost the support of what Mao called “a people’s democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance?”

Protests are becoming increasingly common as social tensions over the growing gap between rich and poor and corruption fuel unrest. In 2004, China reported 74,000 demonstrations of more than 100 people.

Another one I missed earlier, although this certainly isn’t a tactic I condone, or which is calculated to lead to better things for China:

A Chinese farmer has set off a bomb in a court house in north-west China, killing himself and four other people including the court president. . . . The Xinhua state news agency said the 62-year-old farmer forced his way into the court house during a hearing on Friday morning. He then lit a fuse on explosives he was carrying and blew himself up. Four other people in the courtroom were killed including the court president and a local Communist party official. At least 20 others were injured.

The latest uprising, near Zhongshan, is within easy day-trip distance of Kim Jong-Il’s guided tour of China’s grand experiment in class exploitation economic reform!

Governments should always be changed by the most peaceful means available, but governments that use the force of state power to foreclose peaceful change forfeit both their own legitimacy and the right to condemn the people for responding with violence. As Jefferson put it,

[G]overnments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .

I don’t happen to think scattered and dispersed acts of violence will bring down the Chinese regime. In fact, I don’t believe that any form of violence would be as effective–at least at this time–as simply forming a nationwide, non-violent, broad-based opposition movement that would advocate a democratic system of government (something that isn’t possible in North Korea, where peaceful change is highly unlikely). Such a movement, ironically enough, could draw from the same worker-peasant alliance Mao spoke of in the 1930’s. If such a movement could launch a general strike that would fill the streets, shut down the roads, and bring industry to a halt, not one shot would have to be fired, because the Chinese Army wouldn’t be able to end such an uprising the way it did in 1989.

There is much the United States could do quietly to encourage such a movement.

Update 1/17:

The government is resorting to familiar tactics to cover up police murder:

The parents of the girl — whose age was given as either 13 or 15 — have been given up to $25,000, on condition they say she had died of a heart attack, the South China Morning Post and other newspapers in Hong Kong said, citing unidentified villagers.

Her body was cremated on Monday, according to Hong Kong’s Sing Tao newspaper. Police were patrolling the area every few minutes, it said.

Local authorities have refused to comment on the reported death, although the official Xinhua News Agency issued a rare dispatch blaming the villagers for inciting the clashes and denying officers used violence.

Dozens of villagers reached Tuesday by telephone mostly refused to talk about the protest, apparently out of fear of retribution from authorities. One woman said she had heard of the girl’s death, but wouldn’t give her name or any details.

My suspicion is that this will only backfire. Everyone is probably just going to find out from Web sites and text messages anyway.