MCLC: Wukan as a harbinger

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Wukan as a harbinger
***********************************************************

This article seems to get a little deeper than most into the nature of the
conflict in Wukan and the problems in village-level politics/economics
that give rise to popular discontent.

Kirk 

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Source: NYT (12/25/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/world/asia/in-china-the-wukan-revolt-coul
d-be-a-harbinger.html

A Village in Revolt Could Be a Harbinger for China
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING ‹ China¹s state-run media have had a field day this autumn with
Occupy Wall Street, spinning an almost daily morality play about
capitalism gone amok and an American government unable or unwilling to aid
the victims of a rapacious elite.

Occupy Wukan is another matter entirely. The state press has been all but
mute on why 13,000 Chinese citizens, furious over repeated rip-offs by
their village elite,sent their leaders fleeing to safety and repulsed
efforts by the police to retake Wukan. But the village takeover can be
ignored only at Beijing¹s peril: There are at least 625,000 potential
Wukans across China, all small, locally run villages that frequently
suffer the sorts of injustices that prompted the outburst this month in
Wukan.

³What happened in Wukan is nothing new. It¹s all across the country,² said
Liu Yawei <http://www.cartercenter.org/news/experts/yawei_liu.html>, an
expert on local administration who is the director of the China program at
the Carter Center in Atlanta.

A second analyst, Li Fan, estimated, in an interview, that 50 percent to
60 percent of Chinese villages suffered governance and accountability
problems of the sort that apparently beset Wukan, albeit not so severe.
Mr. Li leads the World and China Institute
<http://www.world-china.org/newsdetail.asp?newsid=452>, a private
nonprofit research center based in Beijing that has extensively studied
local election and governance issues.

On paper, the Wukan protests never should have happened: China¹s village
committees should be the most responsive bodies in the nation because they
are elected by the villagers themselves. Moreover, the government has
built safeguards into the village administration process to ensure that
money is properly spent.

Village self-administration, as the central government calls it, is seen
by many foreigners as China¹s democratic laboratory ‹ and while elections
can be rigged and otherwise swayed, many political scientists say they
are, on balance, a good development.

Actually running the villages, however, is another matter. Village
committees must provide many of the services offered by governments, such
as sanitation and social welfare, but they cannot tax their residents or
collect many fees. Any efforts to raise additional money, for things like
economic development, usually need approval from the Communist
Party-controlled township or county seats above them.

In practice, the combination of the villages¹ need for cash and their
dependence on higher-ups has bred back-scratching and corruption between
village officials and their overseers. China¹s boom in land prices has
only broadened the opportunity for siphoning off money from village
accounts.

And the checks and balances ‹ a village legislature to sign off on major
decisions, a citizens¹ accounting committee to watch over the village
books ‹ have turned out to be easily manipulated by those who really hold
the power.
³Land sales are where the big money is,² Edward Friedman
<http://polisci.wisc.edu/people/person.aspx?id=1050>, a political science
professor and a China scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said
in a telephone interview. ³Every level can see how much better the level
above it is doing. And each one wants to live at least that well. The
system has within it a dynamic which makes people feel it¹s only fair that
they get their share of the wealth.²

The opportunities to get that share are vast, apparently. In 2003, a
candidate for village committee chairman in Laojiaotou village, in Shanxi
Province, spent two million renminbi ‹ then about $245,000 ‹ to campaign
for an office that paid 347 renminbi a month, the Chinese journal Legal
News reported at the time.

In interviews this month, leaders of the Wukan protest said it was common
knowledge that local government and Communist Party officials had spent
millions of renminbi to buy potentially lucrative posts. They maintained
that Wukan¹s village committee stayed in power in part by threatening any
challenges to its continued rule.

None of those allegations could be quickly confirmed. One verified
statistic, however, is compelling. Of the nine members of Wukan¹s village
committee, five had held their posts since the committee system itself was
set up under Mao Zedong¹s successor, Deng Xiaoping.

The same was true of the village¹s Communist Party secretary, Xue Chang,
who had held office since 1970 before being replaced amid Wukan citizen
protests in September.

Though a village in legal terms, Wukan is bigger than most such entities.
It sits in urban Guangdong Province, abutting a natural harbor on the
Pacific Ocean that is ideal for development.

Many details of the practices that incited Wukan¹s protests are murky.
Even before the residents chased their village committee leaders from town
on Dec. 11, the village committee¹s accounting ledger had been taken away,
ostensibly for an audit.

Leaders of the protest contend, however, that the village committee sold
off or granted long-term leases to nearly 60 percent of the village¹s 11
square miles over an 18-year period beginning in 1993. The sales were said
to include roughly four-fifths of the village¹s 1.5 square miles of
farmland and much of its forests.

Just how the land was sold remains unclear. Under Chinese law, such sales
are supposed to require approval of the villagers, who collectively own
the land and are supposed to share in the proceeds. But the approval
process is vague; in practice, most decisions are left to the elected
village committee or an appointed village legislature that acts on behalf
of the residents.

The sales also required approval by Donghai township, the level of
government just above Wukan. In some cases, officials in Lufeng, the
county seat whose territory includes Wukan, were also involved in setting
up sales.
The land went to hotels, homes, factories, power companies and even
private funerary temples. One wealthy villager, Chen Wenqing, gained a
business interest in Wukan¹s harbor and a 50-year lease on a large tract
of land used as a pig farm.

A plan this year to sell Mr. Chen¹s farm and an equal amount of villagers¹
farmland to developers of a luxury housing and retail project was the
final straw, though, mobilizing villagers to protest. Beyond seeking a
public accounting of that project and others like it, angry residents
called for democratic elections to replace village officials, many of whom
have been in power for decades.

Villagers say they have no idea where the proceeds from any of the sales
or rentals went. ³From 1993 onward, not one time were we told,² said Lin
Zuluan, a protest leader. ³No voting, no compensation, nothing. We didn¹t
even know what was going on.²

Mr. Lin said that most residents, unfamiliar with the workings of a
village system, had no idea of their rights. That seems plausible; one
recent academic study concluded that three in four residents of villages
that had been surveyed had no information about village finances.

In Wukan, villagers did sense that something was wrong, and had complained
vigorously ‹ between July 2009 and last March, seven times to Guangdong
Province officials and five times to officials of Lufeng, the county seat.
But none of those complaints appear to have been addressed.

It took a de facto revolt by Wukan¹s residents to force Guangdong Province
officials to step into the crisis, calling the villagers¹ grievances
legitimate and promising to address them. Wukan¹s village committee chief
and its party secretary are under investigation, a move that probably will
end in stiff punishment.

The state-run press has hailed the Guangdong response as a model of
government responsiveness and a template for handling public grievances in
the future.

Yet some observers of Chinese governance are less sanguine. In their view,
Wukan¹s uprising highlighted systemic defects in China¹s local
governments, and only a housecleaning ‹ not an isolated slap on the wrist
‹ will address them.

The trouble, they say, is that almost nobody benefits from a housecleaning
‹ not village leaders or township and county officials enriched by land
sales and other corrupt deals. And not higher officials whose influence is
only diminished if they get rid of lower-level supplicants.

³What will change things is if you change the incentives by which make you
make your money,² said Mr. Friedman, of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Allowing peasants to own and sell their land ‹ and not
a village committee ‹ would suggest a serious effort to break the
corruption cycle, he said. So would breaking up the cozy network of
village and local government officials who stand to benefit from land
sales.

For the moment, at least, those sorts of reforms do not appear to be in
the cards. ³The vested interests in the present system are very strong,²
he said. ³And I don¹t think there¹s a Deng in the office who has enough
clout to change things.²