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?
——-
Cross posted at The Peking Duck
An all-too-familiar story. And this is just one instance — the official statistic is, what, 70000 protests a year in China just like this.
Corruption brought down the KMT, and it’s going to bring down the CCP someday if they don’t get a handle on it.
In the spirit of cross-posting:
I have a few questions: where the hell is the government on this? What of Hu’s ‘harmonious society’ and the championing of dialogue to solve disputes? Why haven’t we been reading about this in the state media?
It’s not as if it strengthens the party’s grip on the country to watch impotently as chaos descends in the backwaters. Then again, this happened in Beijing’s backyard. Just how difficult would it be to send in a thousand troops to tell the thugs to ‘back off or else’?
I can’t think of a better way to employ the PLA.
this is how things will change. hard won, painfully, as gradually there are more villagers than thugs when these things reach a flashpoint.
eventually, it may serve the government (and yeah, that’s a big mess of a broad label) well to align themselves with people like mrs. fang, both as a way to rein these abuses in before they explode, but also as a way to regain some sort of popular legitimacy.
hey, mao did it.
A Chinese newspaper named, don’t laugh, “Democracy and Rule of Law Times”, had a few in-depth reports of this effort at impeaching the village bosses starting a couple of months ago. I hope there would be continued and expanded reports in the Chinese media about the recent development.
By the way, here is a photo of the five members of the recall committee. Fang is the one in the middle.
http://img1.qq.com/news/pics/10376/10376952.jpg
I am working in a economic-developed region in South China, and I am advised a story, that some people are very interested to pay much money to have a general leader of a village, because if they have this leader position, he can use his power to earn much more money. He is not so great as we call “Serve the people”, he use his position to earn money for himself. This is not a rare phenomena. In many region, anyone who win higher position win rights, also it means win money. In my village, it is heard, in order to have a General leader of the village, in Chinese we call “村长”, the competitor summon his supporter—in chinese we call“混混”—they have no regular work, they are like gangster, to fight against the rival. When they get to the position, they do not do good things for the village fellow, they only use his power to control the resource, like forest etc. Where is the democracy? It is very common, we are already to be customed to these thing, we are also very dull to these thing, even our right invaded, we are not conscious, even we are conscious, we think it is no use and no any result to claim. In order to claim, we need to pay much more sacrifice. And some people said, do not be against the government, I think he misunderstand,
They are not against the government, they only express the unfair thing happened to them. Some people said, China is so big, anyone will care about these thing? I don’t know how to say, who is to be blame?
I trust “Harmonious Society”, I trust our leader Hu and Wen, their idea is great, and I admire them, and admire their progress. But for the low-level common citizen, for the democracy, these people have none. What time and how to make our law to take effect?? As we know, China new labor law issued, even so, the new law still can not take good effect and well protect the workers’ benefit. Some professor say, the new labor law limit the development of the middle and small size company. They are right in some sense, from his speaking we know, many factory earn profit by making the worker working over time, try to reduce labor cost. As I know, some periods still work the year round, and not a day for holiday. And in some sensitive region, the labor law take partly effect. We plead for a “Harmonious Society”, also need a “Reasonable society”