A Mini-Tienanmen?
A number of papers are covering the story of an apparent massacre in a Chinese village. The New York Times is among them:
SHANWEI, China, Dec. 10 — Four days after a lethal assault on protesters by paramilitary forces, a village in southern China remained under heavy police lockdown on Saturday.
Residents of the village, Dongzhou, interviewed by telephone from this nearby city, said the police continued to make arrests and bar outsiders from their hamlet.
The authorities have still not commented in any detail on the incident, in which villagers said as many as 20 residents of Dongzhou were shot and killed by security forces on Tuesday night as they protested plans for a power plant, in the deadliest use of force by Chinese authorities against ordinary citizens since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Residents of Dongzhou said at least 42 people were missing.
Some accounts reports that the villagers fought back with some type of explosives, for which I would not blame them at all. The government of China has permitted no peaceful and effective means for citizens to alter the decisions of those who govern them. As in North Korea, armed resistance is the only option the government leaves open.
The battle to reclaim the truth goes on. As Chinese blogs spread the word of what happened, the government is trying to dispose of the evidence.
“I was not at the scene that night, but after I heard some people were shot dead, I went to the clinic and saw three dead bodies there,” said a man who gave his name only as Chang. “The next day, I heard there were several bodies lying by the road, where tragedy took place. I went there and saw seven or eight bodies lying there in a row, surrounded by many policemen, who were denying the families’ attempts to claiming for the bodies.
Numerous accounts said that the authorities had thrown corpses into the sea and burned bodies after the killings. Villagers said they had counted 13 bodies floating on the sea.
Villagers also said that several times over the last few days, female residents had approached the police, who are still present in Dongzhou in large numbers, to beg that the bodies of relatives be released.
Others said that people had quickly buried the bodies of their relatives so they could not be destroyed by the police to cover up evidence of the killings.
“I heard that they police had sent dead bodies to Haifeng to be cremated there,” said a man who gave his name as Li, and said he had been at the scene of the shootings. “Some corpses were just burned in the crossroads of the village, but not allowing people to get close to see.
The brutality of the police was shocking, even by Chinese standards.
In another reported episode, six unarmed men from the village fled the violence, climbing a nearby hilltop, where they were pursued by the police and shot, leaving only one survivor, whose account was repeated by villagers on Saturday. Some of the dead, the account said, were wounded from afar and then killed by the police at close range.
Unfortunately, isolated uprisings will get people killed, but won’t overthrow the Mandarins. Ending the rule of the CCP will take a nation-wide democratic resistance movement that can appeal to city dwellers and farmers alike.