MCLC: Wukan glumly returns to polls

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Wukan glumly returns to polls
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (4/1/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/asia/years-after-revolt-chinese-vil
lage-glumly-returns-to-polls.html

Years After Revolt, Chinese Village Glumly Returns to Polls
By DAN LEVIN

WUKAN, China — After staging a very public revolt against official
corruption and then voting in remarkably unfettered democratic elections,
the people who live in this southern Chinese village returned to the polls
on Monday amid torrential rains and growing fears that the Communist Party
was taking back control of their local government.

In December 2011, villagers in Wukan, a fishing hamlet of 15,000 in
Guangdong Province, took to the streets in large protests, chased out
local party officials they accused of illegal real estate deals and
engaged in an 11-day standoff with armed security forces. After drawing
the attention of the international news media, the confrontation ended
peacefully when senior Communist Party officials from the provincial
capital agreed to allow free elections and promised to investigate the
land deals at the heart of the protests.

In March 2012, residents voted into office a number of the protest
leaders, raising hopes, however faint, that the so-called Wukan model of
grass-roots democratic participation might be the start of a political
overhaul in a nation governed by single-party authoritarian rule.

Yet as they arrived on Monday at a heavily guarded schoolyard to begin the
process of electing a new seven-member village committee, many voters said
they had come to view their earlier electoral success as the beginning of
the end of local self-governance.

“There’s a lot less enthusiasm this time around,” said Wang Jinzhen, 62,
after she stuffed her paper ballot into a locked metal box. “We still
haven’t gotten our land back. The municipal and township governments are
corrupt, and they don’t want to help us solve this problem.”

Such widespread disenchantment was heightened by the Communist Party’s
recent moves to undo Wukan’s hard-won political independence. Early last
month, villagers said, higher-level authorities in Donghai township, which
includes Wukan, appointed a formerly ousted official to be the next deputy
secretary of the Wukan party committee, and he will be joined by four of
his former colleagues.

Villagers were particularly outraged by the arrests on bribery charges of
two protest leaders they elected in 2012, Yang Semao and Hong Ruichao,
just weeks before Monday’s election. Mr. Yang was later released on bail,
though Mr. Hong remains in custody. Another protest leader fled to the
United States this year and is seeking political asylum based on claims
that he, too, will become a target of the authorities for challenging
their rule.

The Chinese government introduced local village elections in the 1980s,
but party officials often decide who runs or rig the results to maintain
power. Analysts said the shortcomings of Wukan’s independently elected
leaders, hamstrung by higher authorities or perhaps because of their own
failings, had exposed the limitations of village-level democracy in China
and the risks of trying to push those boundaries.

“The government just does whatever it wants, and if you say anything they
arrest you,” said Cai Keizhou, 35, a driver who participated in the 2011
protests. “It’s like an adult beating a child.”

Holding a crimson umbrella beneath a propaganda banner that read
“civilized election; fair competition,” Mr. Yang, 47, who was hoping to be
elected village chief, had a simple explanation for his detention, “We’re
not collaborators.”

As for the corruption charges, Mr. Yang has acknowledged accepting 20,000
renminbi, or about $3,200, in bribes but said he immediately donated half
to a local school and returned the remaining amount. He would not say who
gave him the money. Although the authorities first questioned Mr. Yang and
Mr. Hong about the bribery accusations last May, they only decided to
detain them two weeks ago, raising suspicions that their detentions were
aimed at preventing them from running again.

A bigger concern among voters, however, was the lack of resolution over
the land deals that prompted the initial protests. The land, more than
1,000 acres of farmland jointly owned by the villagers, had been sold to
developers by the former party secretary, Xue Chang, who held the post for
more than three decades before he was ousted during the rebellion. He was
later convicted on corruption charges. Despite a promised investigation by
the provincial government, only a small portion of the land, some of which
contains a pig farm, a hotel and other properties, has been returned.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, about 400 villagers returned to the
streets in protest last April. Only after the village chief, Lin Zuluan,
sat down to negotiate with officials in Lufeng city, which oversees Wukan,
did people return to their homes. But Mr. Lin, a former protest leader,
has become a target of popular frustration, with some villagers saying he
has become too close to the authorities he once challenged. “I used to
idolize Lin but no longer,” said Hong Ruiqin, 37, a hairdresser whose
brother remains in police detention on bribery charges.

On Monday night, local authorities announced that Mr. Lin had been
re-elected with more than 5,000 of more than 8,000 votes. Voting will
resume on Tuesday to elect two deputy chiefs and four committee members.
“The election in 2012 was voted on emotions and feelings,” Mr. Lin told
journalists in his living room after his victory. “Now it’s much more
mature. We have a clearer understanding of democracy.”

Land disputes are a major cause of unrest in China. About 90,000 protests
or other expressions of civil unrest occur across the country each year,
two-thirds of them related to land appropriated by local authorities who
then resell the property to commercial developers with little or no
compensation provided to the former occupants, according to a 2011 survey
by the Landesa Rural Development Institute <http://www.landesa.org/> of
Seattle, Renmin University in Beijing and Michigan State University.

In Wukan, many villagers expected that their political victory two years
ago would end the need for street protests over land. Li Fan, an elections
expert who runs the World and China Institute
<http://www.world-china.org/newsdetail.asp?newsid=452> in Beijing, said
they sorely misread China’s political reality. “Even though the elected
village committee in Wukan represented the people’s interests, it still
didn’t have any power to deal with higher-level governments or big
state-owned enterprises that have strong political connections,” he said.
“Wukan’s last election was very successful, but it solved nothing. Even if
it’s a success this time around, it won’t solve anything either.”

Yet villagers unhappy with the performance of their elected leadership
turned out in droves to support it anyway. According to the authorities,
voter turnout on Monday was above 90 percent. “If you don’t vote at all,
the municipal government will just install the old corrupt officials,”
said Hong Xiaozhuang, 19, a high school student. “But if you vote there’s
still a silver lining of hope.”