Word: dongzhou
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...villagers say they twice sent representatives to Beijing hoping someone would listen to their land-dispute issue, but no one did. In January, after months of fruitless petitioning of various levels of government, Panlong residents decided to stage a protest near their seized land. A similar effort in nearby Dongzhou village a month before had ended with paramilitary police killing at least six locals. But people in Panlong felt they had no other choice. The protest stayed peaceful for several days, until armed men with electric truncheons descended on the crowd and started beating everyone from young teenagers to elderly...
...Yudui was considered the lucky brother. Like more than 100 million Chinese peasants, he left his rural roots behind for a job in the big city. His younger sibling stayed in the family's hometown, the hamlet of Dongzhou in southern China's Guangdong province. In early December, when Lin returned for a visit, the brothers joined a protest against a nearby power-station project. Locals claim the plant is being built on village rice paddies sold by municipal officials to the power company without proper compensation to the villagers. Moreover, the project involved filling in most of a lake...
...Local officials aren't providing much guidance. Only one police official has been detained in connection with the Dongzhou killings. A month after the shootings, police continue to arrest villagers and block outsiders from entering Dongzhou to investigate whether the official body count of three is too low, as villagers claim. Power-plant construction, residents have been informed, will proceed. Nevertheless, some locals hold out hope that Beijing, which earlier this month targeted rural graft as one of its biggest priorities for 2006, will clean up the mess. "If only the central government knew the truth, they would help...
...What happened next in Dongzhou, though, was far from an ordinary protest. Just after 7 p.m., say two locals reached by TIME by phone, riot police opened fire on the villagers, who responded by throwing homemade explosives normally used by local fishermen to stun fish. By the time the smoke had cleared several hours later, Lin and at least five others were dead, according to the two eyewitnesses, making the Dongzhou riot one of the deadliest incidents in recent years. "We never imagined that they would shoot people," says a Dongzhou housewife surnamed Huang, whose father was injured...
...confrontations between police and protestors-suggests that China?s authorities have realized that in an era of high-speed communication, killings in a remote village can?t be swept under the rug. Still, the state-run media has published only official accounts of the tragedy, and multiple roadblocks near Dongzhou ensure that journalists don?t investigate too closely. China?s future may depend on which aspect of the Dongzhou tragedy dominates its political system: Brute force by local police, or increasing accountability from higher-level authorities...