High-level concern seen in China arrest - Print Version

High-level concern seen in China arrest

By Joseph Kahn The New York Times
MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2005

BEIJING The decision to detain the commander of paramilitary forces who opened fire on villagers protesting land seizures in China's Guangdong Province suggested high-level concern over the accuracy of early reports of what happened in the incident and sensitivity over whether the crackdown was justified, analysts said.

Guangdong's provincial government issued a statement Sunday saying that the "wrong actions" of the commander, who was not named or identified by unit or rank, were to blame for the deaths of civilians in Dongzhou village in coastal Guangdong Province near Hong Kong. The statement said he had been detained by civilian authorities.

The official Xinhua news agency had said that three people were killed and eight others wounded after security forces shot protesters last week. Villagers have given varying estimates of the death toll, including some who said as many as 20 people were killed.

The agency's account, quoting local authorities, initially laid blame for the violence exclusively on villagers. It said local residents, led by three men, first attacked a power plant at the center of a land dispute, then turned on the police, using weapons including spears, knives and dynamite, forcing security forces to put down the insurrection forcibly.

But the subsequent statement by the provincial government suggested a different conclusion, a possible signal that local, provincial and possibly central government leaders had varying reactions to the shooting.

Murray Scot Tanner, an expert on China's security forces at the RAND Corp. in the United States, said Monday that the detention of a commander could well signal fears that Chinese press reports about the incident may not be treated as credible by the general public. He said the authorities were highly reluctant to assign blame to the police or paramilitary troops and almost never do so.

"I can honestly tell you that on the basis of reading hundreds of reports about how police handle protests, I have never seen a report on the detention of a police commander," he said.

The police and paramilitary commanders have limited autonomy to decide on the use of force against civilians and would generally need high-level approval before opening fire. Even if the commander acted on his own or gave inaccurate information to higher authorities before getting approval, however, security forces would generally be expected to close ranks and defend one of their own leaders rather than accept responsibility for mistaken killings.

It would be especially notable if the commander worked for the People's Armed Police, a branch of the military that was reported by villagers to have deployed troops in the area. Civilian government officials generally have no power to detain or bring charges against military officers.

In many such cases, President Hu Jintao, who has the top civilian, military and Communist Party titles, might be expected to be consulted before conflicts between civilian and military officials could be resolved.

Since the large-scale killings to put down a democracy movement in Beijing in 1989, Chinese authorities have invested heavily in training and equipping riot police to suppress protests without the use of lethal force. Since that time, shootings of unarmed demonstrators have been unusual.

China had 74,000 mass incidents of unrest in 2004, according to a police tally. While some of them resulted in deaths and a few led to local declarations of martial law, very few involved police or paramilitary troops opening fire on civilians.

The Dongzhou incident involved sustained protests over the construction of a large power plant, which appeared to have coal-fired and also wind-driven turbines. Some residents complained about the amount of money they received for ceding their land to the government for the plant, while others said a reclamation project connected with the wind-driven turbines would impact fishing the area.

Government officials issued no statements about the shootings until four days after they occurred, leaving villagers to provide their own accounts to Hong Kong and Western media. Villagers still maintain that a number of people remain missing or unaccounted for, but it is possible the authorities are holding people for joining in the protest.

Several Guangzhou newspapers have had reports, but national papers and Web sites have not even carried the Xinhua report, suggesting extreme sensitivity.