MCLC: straight out of Wukan

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Sat Dec 24 10:21:15 EST 2011


MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: straight out of Wukan
***********************************************************

Source: China Beat (12/20/11): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4041

Straight Out of Wukan: A Quick Q & A with Journalist Rachel Beitare
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Earlier this year, a Beijing-based Israeli journalist named Rachel Beitare
contacted me out of the blue to set up an interview about the impact the
Arab Spring events might have in China. I ended up impressed by the
caliber of the questions put to me, so I started keeping an eye out for
her byline, in case she published things in English (much of her work
comes out in Hebrew, which I don¹t read). I wasn¹t disappointed, as before
long Foreign Policy ran a smart commentary, ²Guilty By Association,²
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/17/guilty_by_association>
in which Ms. Beitare looked at the way the Party had been not just
cracking down on critics of the government but hassling their relatives as
well. When I opened a Twitter account, she was someone I made sure to
follow (she tweets as @bendilaowai <http://twitter.com/#!/bendilaowai>),
and she¹s one of several China-based journalists I think uses the medium
especially well.

I was thus excited to learn from her Twitter posts that she¹d made it to
Wukan to report on the dramatic events unfolding in that South China
community, where villagers have been mourning a fallen protester while
engaged in a stand-off with representatives of the government. A recent
NPR report described the Wukan struggle as a conflict that ³began as a
property dispute [and] has escalated into an open revolt [that has become]
one of the most serious episodes of unrest that the Chinese Communist
Party has faced in recent years.² The Wukan events are important because
they underscore just how much anger there is in China over efforts by
unscrupulous developers and corrupt officials to take advantage of rural
landholders, and have a special interest to me, since just before the
story brokeMegan Shank <http://www.meganshank.com/> and I had made the
final corrections on a story, ³Anxious Times in a Rising China,² which
will appear in the Winter issue of Dissent magazine and focuses on recent
protests and expressions of discontent in the PRC.

Eager to learn more about what is going on and to find out what she makes
of it, I sent Ms. Beitarie an email with a set of questions; these are
provided along with the answers she sent in Tuesday morning (Beijing time):

JW: You recently tweeted that you¹d finished a report on the protests. Is
it online yet? If not‹or if it is only up in Hebrew‹can you fill me in on
what sort of piece it is, if there¹s a main take-away about the state of
play or likely prospects of the struggle?

RB: Thank you very much for this kind introduction. The report I was
tweeting about will come out in Hebrew this Thursday. It¹s a magazine
piece for ³Calcalist² in which I try to chronicle events in Wukan pretty
much hour by hour from Saturday onward (we are still updating it). That
was actually my editor¹s suggestion and was a good way to give a sense of
a story in progress and to record the ups and down in daily life in Wukan
these days. It is a bit like tweeting actually. We also tried to give a
broader perspective in the text to show how each of Wukan¹s grievances is
related to a broader issue in China. I suppose the main take-away is that
whereas Wukan¹s problems are local, a real long-term solution can only
come through some wider government reforms in China. I really don¹t have a
definite view regarding the prospects of the struggle, but I¹m not very
optimistic. I¹m afraid at least for the leaders of these demonstrations,
there will be severe retribution, though for the village as a whole, they
might get some of their land back, so it can make things a bit better, but
I don¹t see much chance of a fundamental change under the current system
of village governance.

JW: I¹ve been following the Wukan events long distance via reports like a
much-circulated early one by Malcolm Moore
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8954315/Inside-Wukan-
the-Chinese-village-that-fought-back.html> and the later one by Louisa Lim
<http://www.npr.org/2011/12/16/143844217/chinese-property-dispute-becomes-a
-bitter-showdown>, from which I pulled the phrases used in my opening
summary. Have these given me a clear basic sense of what¹s been going on
and the stakes of this confrontation? Is there anything crucial that you
feel is being left out or underplayed in the international coverage of the
standoff?

RB: The reports you¹ve mentioned were probably some of the best to come
out of Wukan, and of course Malcolm Moore deserves all the credit for
being the first to break the story to international media. In general I
think there has been a lot of really excellent reporting from many
different angles. Obviously I haven¹t read all the reports, so I can¹t say
if something has been left out. (Last night in Wukan¹s improvised media
center, a few locals asked me to show them via my computer whether their
issue was really being reported. We did a Google news search that came
back with some 1300 hits in English and hundreds in Chinese.) However, one
point I can think about that will probably still be open for much
discussion is the role the foreign media itself has been playing in this
story. Inviting the media in was the villagers¹ own decision and helped
them get a lot of publicity, but it may land them in even bigger trouble
in the end than if they hadn¹t. I think we all need some distance from the
situation to properly analyze the pros and cons.

JW: A month or so ago, I would probably have been tempted to flag the
high-speed rail crash of July as the most significant Chinese political
event of 2011, due to the rage unleashed online by the event itself and
the Party¹s efforts to cover-up what had happened. Others might have put
Ai Weiwei¹s detention at the top of their list. Do you think Wukan might
tell us even more important things about sources of discontent in today¹s
China than either of those two things?

RB: Oh absolutely. The reason Wukan is such a gripping story is that the
village¹s situation encapsulates almost all of the big issues that trouble
Chinese society: Rural poverty vs. rapid development, unchecked power,
growing economic gaps, environmental degradation, corruption, official
violence, the balance of power between Beijing and the provinces, it¹s all
there in one incident. Also, the power of the Internet and social media,
as well as their limitations‹that was demonstrated in the Wenzhou train
crash case and with Ai Weiwei and is also present here.

What¹s more, the Wukan case is different than either Wenzhou¹s or Ai
Weiwei¹s in that it takes place in the countryside, where most Chinese
still live and where the problems are most acute, but get little
attention, so definitely it touches all the most serious reasons for
discontent.

JW: Any final thoughts? Perhaps about lines that could be drawn, however
tenuous, to connect developments in Wukan to the Middle East and North
Africa or the Occupy protests in other parts of the world.

RB: Well, unlike the people in Egypt or Libya, in Wukan they clearly and
repeatedly say they do not wish to overthrow the government and trust the
Communist party. How sincere they are in saying this remains for us to
speculate about but that is the message they want to get out.

Having said that, there are some similarities to some movements we¹ve seen
around the world this year in both causes and conduct. They are similar in
that protest stems from a sense of gross injustice caused by ever growing
economic gaps. Another similarity is in the way people form their own
mechanisms for self governing a micro-environment, in Wukan like in Tahrir
or in tent cities in NYC, Madrid, my hometown, Tel-Aviv, and elsewhere
around the world, and in how people gradually find ways to educate
themselves about their own situation, the causes of what is happening to
them and valid ways to solve their problems.

The situation here is very different, but maybe the sentiment of people
power, the will and ability to work together with others to achieve better
results instead of trying to get results individually is very similar.
Ironically, educating and organizing peasants is how the Communist Party
itself got to power so they probably understand better than anyone else
the potential of such developments in rural areas, which is why the Wukan
case is important‹and the situation very risky for Wukan¹s people.

This post also appeared at Dissent
<http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=570>.





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