Up to 2,000 people attacked the local Communist Party headquarters in Longnan City, Gansu Province (甘肃省, 陇南市), northwest China in protest over a land dispute, according to the HK Standard of November 18, quoting Chinese state media. About 30 people protesting the eviction plans gathered at the party headquarters Monday morning but the crowd swelled to about 2,000 throughout the day and into the evening, according to Xinhua. The location was Longnan City, Wudu District (陇南市, 武都城区) – a poverty-stricken region that had suffered in addition from the big earthquake in May of this year (also HK Standard, of November 20). Longnan City is in southern Gansu province bordering Shaanxi in the east and Sichuan in the south.
The riots were apparently triggered by eviction plans.
Singapore’s Morning News Net quotes Longnan City’s information office as saying yesterday that the siege around the municipal party compound had ended, that more than sixty police, officials and members of the general public had been been seriously injured, and that eleven cars plus a great quantity of files and other assets inside the two municipal party committee buildings had been destroyed.
Both China Daily and the Morning News net article quote a statement by Longnan’s city government which refers to the first small number of protestors as petitioners – “The petitioners “were provoked by a small minority of people with ulterior motives”. “Small minority” is the usual kind of official terminology in cases which embarrass the Chinese Communist Party.
A Global Voices post contains some possible explanations about as to how the tension which lead to the riots built up. At the moment, it also contains videos which apparently record scenes of the street fight between protesters and police. The videos were apparently uploaded at Youku first, and at Youtube later.
Media based inside mainland China offer possible background information, too. According to Caijing Net (财经网), the incident can be traced back to January 2004, when the State Council approved Longnan to become a city and set up the Wudu District as a new administrative center with favorable policies. As new buildings went up, many of the area’s residents were forced to move out. Many of them are still living in the temporary houses, waiting for new houses to be built by the government. A rumor that Longnan’s administrative center would move to another district started circulating in March of this year, arousing the dissatisfaction of Wudu residents. They worried that the relocation would put an end to construction in their district and that construction on their new houses would be delayed. Many became vocal with their discontent.
The HK Standard (through China Daily) quotes Public Security minister Meng Jianzhu saying that police “should be fully aware of the challenge brought by the global financial crisis and try their best to maintain social stability”. The rioting follows strikes by taxi drivers and labor protests in major export regions, where thousands of factories have closed, prompting fears the financial crisis could stir wider popular unrest, writes the HK Standard.
According to an entry of today (that’s Nov 21 local time in China) on the website of Longnan’s city government, most of the shops have re-opened, and production work and the lives of the masses are returning into normal, after more than one day of diligent work. The article also quotes a village official who is worried that the riots may have left negative influence on reconstruction work in the area recovering from the earthquake, and a teacher from Longshan Practical Primary School (or Experimental Primary School? – 实验小学), who kept a watchful eye on the childrens’ safety.
Tags: blogging, business, CCP, earthquake, economy, evictions, financial crisis, industrial relations, media, propaganda
November 21, 2008 at 1:24 am
It is interesting to see how Chinese officials are starting to blame everything that has gone wrong in China on the global financial crisis.
The Chinese netizens’ comments translated at Global Voices seem to suggest that people are suspecting someone is fiddling with emergency relief money. So it’s not just a case of worrying about a delay in the constructing of new homes.
A friend of mine and her family were victims of the Tangshan earthquake. She was very young at the time. She once told me that she spent her whole childhood and teenage years living in a tent, waiting for her house to be rebuilt. I didn’t quite believe in her story then, not that I thought she was lying, but more like she might have exaggerated the story. Now this incident at Gansu mades me realize how something like that might have happened.
November 21, 2008 at 3:25 am
Have you guys read the “The Longnan riots and the CCP’s global spin campaign” article? Not only it is a pretty comprehensive coverage of the events, with sources and links, but also a take on the CCP’s (news media) Control 2.0 strategy.
http://cmp.hku.hk/2008/11/20/1368/
As for that snippet about earthquake relief C.A. offers in her comment, I recently came across an account by someone who recently snooped around places hit by this year’s quake. He quoted a local: “We were promised a compensation at (equivalent of) $60/square metre of lost dwellings. What we got was $15. Where is the rest of the money?” Who needs a crystal ball to divine that… But I haven’t saved the link to this. Stoopid me… sorry.
November 21, 2008 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the info, C.A. and Neddy. I’d think that the task of foreign correspondents now is to test the reliability of Beijing’s offer – that they can travel anywhere and conduct interviews with anyone without prior official permission. The problem with our mainstream media is that they seem to believe that China begins in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong and ends West of Anhui province.
That said, I think that the comparatively open media approach in China recently is news. One motive for this approach may be that there may be officials who actually think that more openness about “incidents” like the Longnan riots may help to hold local officials accountable without much more democratization (which wouldn’t be a real promising approach, but still a new approach).
Corruption is one undeniable cause for unrest. In that regard, the cnhubei article, translated by the China Media Project is pretty old-fashioned in style, but illustrative in its argumentation.
Now, for the funding that is draining away from compensation and reconstruction into unplanned budgets and pockets, I’d say it has a lot to do with the global economic crisis anyway. As long as incomes are generally rising, corruption is more tolerable than when times get tough, and budgets get tight.
I don’t want to downplay corruption in China – it is on an extraordinary scale for a country that has developped so rapidly in many fields. But public money has a tendency to arrive in unintended places. How much of the foreign aid pledged for Afghanistan during two international donor conferences has really arrived in Kabul to date? And how much of that has been used appropriately by the Karzai government and local warlords?
The opportunity I see in this crisis is that it forces governments and business people to make smarter choices – I’m really curious about the plan the US government has demanded from GM before bailing it out. As for China’s choices, I think that its more open approach can help – anything that provides information for foreign investors can create more trust than the secretive approach the CCP has taken up until now. But any unrest will come to light. You can’t hide something like the Longnan conflicts in this digital age.
I expect better work from Western correspondents in China – they must go beyond the big cities close to the East Coast more frequently. But this coverage won’t make that much of a difference in China.
I think the decisive point will be if the CCP will become more accountable to its own people. Only a government that earns the trust of its own people will earn the trust of foreign investors – no matter how Beijing spins the propaganda.
I think the picture of China within and without has become more realistic in the past one or two years.