Word: protestants
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...almost too scared to talk. "I am just a farmer," he whispers, shortly after the police had descended on his village of Panlong in China's southern Guangdong province. "I know I don't matter." But what he has witnessed does. In mid-January, the man joined a remarkable protest against the local government's decision to seize communal farmland and lease it to a foreign investor. For several days, more than 1,000 villagers gathered near the disputed land, brandishing pitchforks and blocking a highway. But the brief exercise in free expression ended in tragedy. As dusk fell...
...case of Panlong, 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...
...central government has experimented with programs that channel money more directly to the people meant to receive it--one project involves wiring teachers' salaries to post-office accounts instead of leaving pay at the discretion of local officials. But the authorities' main tactic for stopping the spread of rural protests remains preventing word about them from getting out. Panlong residents say that since the Jan. 14 protest, their uncensored satellite feed from Hong Kong has been cut, so they have little idea how the outside world views their story. Journalists who try to get close to the village have been...
...China may not be able to stifle the voices of protest much longer. About 30 miles from Panlong, in the village of Lishan, a farmer named Liang Beidai is one of the growing number who are ready to fight back. Three Lishan residents were injured last month after protests of land seizures turned bloody, with a high school student allegedly shot in the head. "We are prepared to die for [our rights]," says protest leader Liang. "The entire village is doomed anyway. We have no money, no job, no land. There's nothing left to be scared of." If angry...
...value of the work that I and my colleagues try to do. The Chinese students wanted to know how ordinary people got their ideas about liberty. They were surprised when I told them that some of it came from religion. They wanted to know if I thought violent protest was also necessary. They pushed me hard on the question of slavery. But they were also fascinated with the rainbow of faces they saw on campus. “How can there be so many different races here,” one student asked. She said people back home had warned...