Violence works where peace failed for China villages

By Lindsay Beck 1 hour, 7 minutes ago

HUASHUI, China - For years, the villagers of Huashui gave peace a chance but in the end it was violence that won results.

After chemical plants set up shop in a nearby industrial park, residents of this farming town in China‘s wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang pressed authorities to shut them down, complaining that waste was polluting their crops and river.

Using China‘s centuries-old method of petitioning, they took complaints first to local authorities, then to city officials, and finally all the way to the central government, more than 1,000 km (600 miles) away in Beijing.

"None of it achieved any results," said one resident, who asked not to be named.

For five years, frustration built. Then, as the villagers in Huashui, near the Zhejiang city of Dongyang, moved to block the road leading to the plant, their frustration exploded.

"Ordinary people don‘t have any other way. It was only by not letting the workers in that we could stop the factory from producing," said the resident.

She gestures at the landscape where plants making everything from chemicals to zippers are encroaching on what was once some of China‘s most fertile farmland.

The blockade escalated into a full-scale riot involving as many as 30,000 people. Thousands of police had to be called in from neighboring towns to put it down.

The chemical factories have been shut down.

A couple of hours drive away in Xinchang, where villagers lived for years with waste from a pharmaceuticals plant, residents have a similar tale.

An explosion at the plant last June brought longstanding grievances to the surface, and when a meeting with the factory head was postponed, the anger bubbled over.

More than 10,000 villagers stormed the plant, throwing stones and attacking police lines.

Production at the Jingxin Pharmaceutical Company was halted.

"The problems have all been resolved. People are drinking safe water now," said an official who oversees the village of Huangniqiao, whose fields and river border the plant.

China‘s Communist leadership places a premium on maintaining stability as it tries to steer forward rapid economic and social change without loosening its grip on political power.

But analysts say local officials‘ wariness of any input from below is exacerbating social conflicts and leading to the very unrest the government is trying to avoid.

"If ordinary people in China don‘t make trouble, nothing is resolved," said Lang Youxing, a political scientist at Zhejiang University, in the provincial capital, Hangzhou.

"But if everyone thinks problems can only be resolved with violence, that‘s a very dangerous situation," he said.

SCAPEGOATS

The resolution of the two protests sends a mixed signal to residents.

Closing the factories implies that the government agrees they were right all along. And in the Dongyang case, the city‘s party secretary and its former mayor were also sacked, reinforcing the message that higher authorities sided with the people.

But in that case four residents also received jail terms for their role in the riots.

Wei Rujiu, the Beijing-based lawyer who agreed to defend the villagers when they could find no one else to represent them, says the underlying problem was that they had no means for redress.

"Will there be more problems because channels for redress are closed?" asked Wei. "That is the case now and it will be that way in the future."

Lang, the professor, says that for things to improve, local leaders will have to shake off their wariness of hearing complaints.

In the eyes of officials, he said, "the fewer petitions the better and it‘s best to have none."

Many officials are loath to receive complaints because they are paralyzed by their lack of capacity to respond, he says.

The Huashui residents are still upset over not receiving compensation, for example, but local government may have neither the means nor the authority to pay out the sums demanded.

Still, unless they can better accommodate their constituents‘ desires, pressures are likely to continue to build into the violent outbursts the government is so bent on avoiding.

Asked if she had regrets over the protests, one Huashui residents whose relative is among those jailed, said that looking back she could see no other way.

"We were helpless. We had no alternative," she said. "And we were angry. Of course we‘re angry."

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng)