There are situations where the venality of officials transcends the usual debate over political systems and makes me despair not for any particular locality or government, but for human nature in general. This is just such a case.
From The Christian Science Monitor:
“When Fang Zhaojuan began organizing her neighbors here to impeach village leaders whom she suspected of corruption, she had no idea that the challenge would lead her first to the hospital and then to jail.
She was following the law, after all, and had launched legal petitions signed by a large majority of villagers. They believed they had been cheated of proper compensation when their village council had sold land for industrial development to the government of a nearby township.
Mrs. Fang, her family, and colleagues on a recall committee, however, found themselves plunged into a violent political drama. This, they say, has shown residents of the hamlet just how narrow the boundaries remain for their democratic rights. It has also, they add, hardened their resolve to enforce them.
Huiguan, a nondescript cluster of brick houses outside the port of Tianjin, is like tens of thousands of other Chinese villages, on the verge of being swallowed up by a fast-expanding city. Its farmland has all but disappeared under new factories, and under circumstances that Fang, a 43-year-old widow, found suspicious.
“She never expected this,” says her sister, Fang Zhaohui, displaying photographs of Fang’s bruised and bloody body taken in the hospital six weeks ago, after thugs had broken into her home and beaten her. “She never expected it would be so difficult and that the government would be so black.”
Keep in mind that Mrs. Fang was not trying to introduce some radical new Western concept she picked up while perusing the Federalist Papers, she was attempting to avail herself of rights already enshrined in Chinese law. As Peter Ford said in his audio commentary, Chinese leaders may dislike talk of democracy, but they are interested in establishing rule of law. Sadly, predictably, the efforts of Mrs. Fang and her fellow citizens brought out the worst in the thugs and goons who run her local parish, anxious to preserve their power in the face of organized, legitimate opposition.
I know a little about the back story to this article. These villagers knew that talking to the Monitor would get them in trouble, several have been arrested since being interviewed, but they had the guts to stand up to the Man Purse Brigade and the local bully boys and say: “Enough.”
You want to talk about courage?
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Cross posted at The Peking Duck
