Chinese Hush Up Killing of Village Tax Rebels
Before dawn last Sunday, April 22, 2001, more than 600 police officers and paramilitary troops stormed this village in southern China and opened fire on a crowd of unarmed farmers, killing two and wounding at least 18, witnesses and local officials say.
The shootings, which have not been reported in either the local or national Chinese news media, were one of the most severe incidents of civil strife known in recent years, the latest act in a three-year struggle pitting the 1,400 residents of Yuntang against township and county officials.
The villagers have refused to pay what they call illegal and impossibly high local taxes and fees, and the officials have labeled the villagers a "criminal gang."
As a tangible sign of their resistance, last year the villagers erected a strong iron gate across the only road into Yuntang, keeping it locked and guarded to prevent the entry of official vehicles.
The bitter strife in this village and untold others, most of it never publicly reported, reflects the anger and despair among the millions of farm families in China's traditional breadbasket region. Even as the national economy booms, incomes have stagnated in villages across central and southern China, most young people migrate to coastal cities to perform menial jobs, and local governments are so short of money that officials and teachers often go unpaid for months at a time.
The use of gunfire against unarmed citizens has been rare in recent years, and Sunday's clash is a sharp reminder of the domestic pressures bearing on the country's leaders and Communist Party members as they try to modernize China without losing control of it.
The shootings in Yuntang, with their echoes of the 1989 shooting of hundreds of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, stemmed in part from the economic strains that are bound to grow as China joins the World Trade Organization and opens up industries and agriculture.
The people of Yuntang remain defiant but also fearful of further reprisals, and when a foreign reporter arrived unexpectedly, he was told to leave quickly. One older man apologized, saying, "If the Communist regime knows we are meeting the foreign press, they might level our village."
The authorities of Jiangxi Province, where this rice-farming village of the lower Yangtze basin lies, largely managed to suppress news of the killings.
Still, villagers say the authorities apparently recognized the potentially explosive nature of the incident because a provincial secretary of the Community Party was dispatched to the village on the evening of the incident and he promised an investigation.
The deadly clash in Yuntang is the latest sign of instability in Jiangxi, a relatively poor province known as a cradle of Mao's Communist revolution. A county not far from Yuntang was the site of another major, internationally publicized conflict last August, when more than 10,000 farmers protesting high taxes rampaged through township offices and officials' homes.
There is no sign that farmers from the two restless counties have joined forces, something the authorities particularly are trying to prevent.
The villagers have kept a pile of empty shell casings as well as the bodies of the two dead men, Yu Xinguang, 38, and Yu Xinquan, 22, as potential evidence. They say they have not heard from Su Guosheng, a village leader who had dared to take complaints about excess taxes to Beijing, and fear the police will beat him to death; villagers say he was detained the day before the raid.
Resentment against rising taxes and official corruption had been building for years, but the ire of the once-glorified peasantry of Yuntang erupted in 1998. That year, despite vast flooding of the Yangtze River basin that wiped out their crops, local taxes and fees were actually raised by nearly one-third, to $36 for every one-seventeenth of a hectare (one-seventh of an acre) of cropland.
In any year the levy would be a large burden for village families, who each control little more than a tenth of a hectare of rice paddy and at best reap a meager profit. They refused to pay.
This week, putting their case to a visitor, they showed the line of those 1998 floodwaters, about 2.4 meters (8 feet) up the walls of their homes. In 1999, farm taxes were increased again and the farmers were told they must settle their overdue taxes from 1998 as well. So they refused, again, to pay.
"There are corrupt officials at every level - town, county and city - and they have been collaborating to get more for themselves," a farmer said.
This month, local officials apparently decided to use what is called the new national strike hard campaign to break the village's resistance.
On Saturday they arrested Mr. Su, considered a ringleader of the dissent. On Sunday at 4 a.m., at least 600 officers of the local police and the People's Armed Police, an anti-riot force, arrived in trucks and vans.
The officers had been told that everyone living in Yuntang was part of a "criminal gang,"' witnesses later said.
Armed with rifles, pistols and electric prods, the officers ran around the village's roadblock and started breaking into homes, waking the residents. Witnesses said the officers faced a crowd of hundreds in front of the primary school and at 4:20 a.m. they opened fire.
By some accounts, they began by aiming at the villagers' legs but, when farmers started fighting back with rocks and sticks, they shot to kill. The two deaths were confirmed by a township official, who added, shaking his head, "Those taxes in 1998 were too high."