generalspeaking

Deadly Justice

"If you call it a self-defence, it might be a bit radical, but what else can a villager do when he cannot resort to the law, gets no response from the local government and finds it useless to petition the higher authority?"
Huang Qi, rights advocate

"It shows the local government has not made effective efforts to resolve the conflict between the developer and the villagers."
Beijing Times newspaper editorial

Villagers guard the entrance to Fuyou village in Yunnan province where the violence took place. Photograph: Wong Campion/REUTERS

A dispute. One with a deadly message. And the messengers defend their actions. Actions that penalized not the oppressor necessarily, but those hired to carry out the work that infuriated a village. Another instance where in the backwoods of China, villagers have no recourse to the law, since the law is whatever Communist headmen of the village claim it to be, and theirs is the authority supported by Beijing.

In the southwestern province of Yunnan in the village of Fuyou residents complained of no compensation for land taken from them for a warehouse and logistics centre. Because of the standoff which the local government took no effort to come to grips with, the project at hand was delayed by the developer. And then the developer decided to proceed without paying attention to the complaints of the villagers for compensation.

The villagers had lost fertile lands that had provided them with an agricultural living and comfort. Without the use of the communal lands they were bereft of their livelihoods. This is a common enough story in rural China where such deadly confrontations take place. Because they've become so commonplace an alarmed central government is rethinking legal reforms to grant more independence to local courts in the hope of alleviating tensions between residents and local government.

Tension boiled over  in the villagers' dispute with a property developer. The municipal government issued a statement describing a village gone amok. Eight people, including two villagers died Tuesday in the violence. Eight construction workers were detained by the villagers when the developer decided to restart work on the site. The villagers tied the workers' hands and feet, beat them, poured gasoline over them and threw them on a road close to the construction site.

With improvised weapons the villagers later stormed the construction site clashing violently with hired hands. According to the party-run Guangning Daily newspaper the villagers became impoverished once the lands were seized. And, asked the newspaper, where did the police equipment including military bags in the hands of those hired on the construction project, come from?

Labels: China, Crimes, Social Failures, Violence

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 18, 2014