HONG KONG - If, as the African proverb
goes, it takes a village to raise a child, then
can the now iconic village of Wukan in China's
southern Guangdong province raise a nation on
principles of free speech, transparent governance
and democracy?
That is the hope - for the
Wukan villagers whose protests against the
wholesale theft of their land by corrupt local
officials made international headlines over the
holiday season and for the growing mass of Chinese
netizens who have taken up their cause in
cyberspace.
Some overly exuberant analysts
see a possible Chinese Spring in the making,
mirroring the political upheaval that has rocked
the Arab world over the past year. But don't count
on it.
The Wukan uprising, inspirational
as it may have been, has now
been quieted by the savvy
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief in Guangdong,
Wang Yang, who is exploiting the crisis to advance
his own political ambition to secure a seat on the
all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee during
the leadership shuffle later this year at the 18th
party congress.
For years, top Guangdong
officials ignored complaints about land grabs in
Wukan - a coastal fishing village of about 13,000
residents located 120 kilometers east of Hong Kong
- but this time the 56-year-old Wang saw an
opportunity to burnish his reputation as a
peacemaker who listens and responds to the people
he serves (or rules).
By approving an
investigation into illegal land sales in the
village and sacking the two local officials
believed to have sanctioned and profited from
these sales, Wang has made a deft political move
that can only help him in his rivalry with another
rising star in the party, Bo Xilai, 62, the party
secretary in the southwestern municipality of
Chongqing.
In contrast to Wang, Bo, who
also aspires to win a coveted place on the
standing committee, is noted for his zeal for the
revolutionary rhetoric of Mao Zedong and for his
hard-line approach to dissent and law enforcement.
Come this autumn, when the 18th party
congress convenes in Beijing to choose a fifth
generation of Chinese leaders, we will see whether
Bo's hard line or Wang's softer style proves more
popular. The congress is widely expected to name
current Vice President Xi Jinping as President Hu
Jintao's successor, while Vice Premier Li Keqiang
will most likely take over from Premier Wen
Jiabao.
But the battle for seats on the
nine-person Politburo Standing Committee is still
on, with both Wang and Bo jockeying for a place
around a table reserved for China's most powerful
men. It would be ironic if the near-revolution
staged against party leaders in a village in his
province were to help Wang - whose loyalty is
first and foremost to the one-party rule that is
the foundation of his power - outpoint his
Chongqing rival to enter the rarefied realm of the
standing committee.
Bo has his revival of
Mao's revolutionary spirit and his ruthless
crackdown on crime and corruption to boast about -
even if lawyers and human-rights activists who
dared to defend the accused in that crackdown were
also targeted.
Wang's bragging rights come
from presiding over China's most prosperous
province - and now also from successfully defusing
the potentially destabilizing crisis in Wukan. As
land grabs and corrupt local officials have become
an unfortunate, nationwide staple of Chinese
capitalism, current politburo members undoubtedly
took note of Wang's triumph of appeasement in
Wukan, where villagers whose rioting had chased
local officials out of town just a few weeks ago
now offer praise and thanks to provincial leaders
for their intervention.
A hardline
response would only have exacerbated the
long-boiling frustration and the violence that
eventually broke out in Wukan. Wang's softer line
has set a new and refreshingly liberal-minded tone
in Guangdong, although it remains to be seen
whether the injustices inflicted on Wukan will be
fully rectified.
That change in tone has
been a long time coming - for Wukan, for Guangdong
and for China. The villagers' complaints and
petitions about illegal land seizures and corrupt
local officials go back at least 20 years. Indeed,
the two sacked officials - Xue Chang, the party
secretary for the city of Lufeng, in which Wukan
is located, and village chief Chen Shunyi - had
both held their posts for 40 years.
Xue
and Chen are now under investigation for
corruption, but it took four decades to bring them
down. And, surely, they were not acting alone. The
entire local political structure is rotten - in
Wukan and elsewhere - and requires major
house-cleaning and reform.
As villagers
tell the story, local officials started selling
off their collectively owned land to developers
after Xue launched the Wukan Port Development
Company in the early 1990s and appointed himself
the company's general manager. Villagers say the
company paid each of them a mere 550 yuan (US$87)
for their land, which was then used to build roads
and housing estates bringing huge profits.
Finally, last September, the people of
Wukan had had enough. Following yet another
illegal sell-off, thousands of residents took to
the streets in protest, storming a police station,
an industrial park and the local Communist Party
offices in Lufeng. To avoid the wrath of the mob,
party officials were forced to flee the scene.
Rattled authorities later agreed to enter
into negotiations with 13 representatives
democratically elected by villagers, but before
those talks could bear fruit, several of the
representatives were arrested. One them,
42-year-old Xue Jinbo, died last month in police
custody.
Police said Xue died of a sudden
heart attack after confessing to damaging property
and disrupting public services in Wukan, but his
family and friends insisted he was a victim of
police brutality.
When police refused to
release Xue's body for the funeral service planned
by his family, villagers once again threatened to
riot. That's when, with everyone expecting another
iron-fisted crackdown, Wang's deputy, Zhu Mingguo,
stepped in with a peace offering.
Zhu's
December 21 meeting with village representatives
in Lufeng resulted in the dismissal of the two
long-standing officials, the release of Xue's body
for a second autopsy, an investigation into the
land seizures and a promise to make public all of
the village's financial records.
The
protests stopped immediately as village elders
showered praise on provincial authorities.
Finally, somebody had listened to them.
Since the Wukan breakthrough, Wang has
been busy making political capital out of his
success. For example, addressing a meeting of the
Guangdong party congress this week, Wang promised
to use the "Wukan approach" to clean up village
politics throughout the province.
"Zhu
Mingguo leading a delegation into Wukan village
was not only meant to solve problems in the
village," Wang was reported as saying, "but also
to set a reference standard to reform village
governance across Guangdong."
It is a
pledge that other party leaders may be wise to
heed. According to the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, 50 million farmers had their land seized
last year, and the number is increasing at a rate
of three million farmers per year.
That's
a lot of potential Wukans on the horizon for
China.
Kent Ewing is a Hong
Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached
at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on
Twitter: @KentEwing1
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