VisitCHN

From afar, the huge banners draped across the village square of Wukan on Saturday seemed to herald a town fête. When a man stood up on a scooter to straighten a 20ft banner, however, its message suggested the inhabitants were under siege: “If all the farmland is sold, we will be slaves, losing our village.”

With his action, it was as if a curtain had lifted in a theatre. The square suddenly came to life, with scores of residents clamouring about a recent seizure of village land for an industrial park and other projects. “The hills have been sold, the sea has been sold, the land has been sold,” a middle-aged man said. “We have no land to plough.”

Variations of this complaint are heard repeatedly across China as arbitrary land acquisition by government officials provokes violent protests by villagers and sometimes city residents. But the protests and brutal police retaliation last week in Wukan in the southern province of Guangdong are a particular embarrassment for Wang Yang, Guangdong’s liberal Communist party secretary.

In July Mr Wang said the provincial government must devise a new social contract that moved from “controlling” to “steering” people.

He said that since the economy of Guangdong – China’s wealthiest province – was the first to be liberalised, its social transformation had been more rapid than elsewhere.

Earlier this summer Mr Wang ordered a halt to the seizure of land by government and demolitions of old neighbourhoods in the province’s capital of Guangzhou.

At the same time, in Shenzhen, the special economic zone just across the border from Hong Kong, new measures to reduce civil unrest were introduced that included holding security personnel responsible if their actions sparked a riot.

But none of that prevented the events of the past week in Wukan, a town of 20,000 a few hours’ drive from the border between Guangdong and Hong Kong. On Wednesday several thousand villagers petitioned the local government office of Lufeng to stop the acquisition of village farmland and the site of ancestral graves by a powerful businessman they alleged colluded with local party officials. The demonstration turned violent after villagers were turned away and told to raise the issue with their local Communist party cadre, but were unable to locate any party officials. “Village officials didn’t show up to give us an explanation . . . so we went to their office and smashed it up,” said one man. The enraged villagers also attacked structures in the industrial park.

Estimates of the amount of land – which locals said was collectively owned by the residents – that was grabbed ranged from 300 to 1,000 hectares.

“Many Chinese media regard us as a mob. The truth is different,” said one man, who said he had returned to his village to join the protests, travelling 1,000km from Guangxi province where he works. “If we don’t come back to help, our village will die.”

On Thursday scores of policemen retaliated. Video footage obtained by the Financial Times showed police getting out of armoured cars and other vehicles and chasing anyone who happened to be on the streets. A 15-year-old boy returning from school was beaten and kicked by two policemen.

Villagers said that two children had been taken to hospital bleeding profusely and that a 13-year-old girl had gone missing. A frail woman in her eighties said she too was attacked by police. In response, infuriated residents of Wukan attacked the police station and overturned police cars.

By the weekend the more liberal Guangdong governance style Mr Wang has espoused was at last in evidence. Instead of the government responding with reinforcements, the police were withdrawn from the village altogether on Friday to allow tempers to cool. Following a meeting on Saturday involving 1,000 villagers, local officials promised an investigation this week into the land sales.

Guangdong’s government may be the most liberal in the country, but it is buffeted between a more assertive population and local security personnel as repressive as any in China. As the events in Wukan showed, under such circumstances “steering” people may prove more complicated than “controlling” them used to be.

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