Today's Dongzhou coverage
For you, o supportive cousin who blogs....
Minnie Chan in the online version of the South China Morning Post is reporting that nine villagers have been arrested. What is odd, the locals note, is that their pictures were not shown on TV. Normally, when there is a big arrest like this, their faces are shown on TV to make a big show of the round-up. This time that was not the case. Perhaps this adds doubt to who is really alive and in custody and who is really dead? I don't know.
The widow of one of the villagers killed was offered 50,000 RMB as compensation on the condition that the body was buried immediately and under official supervision. The family of course suspects that the body was tampered with, or isn't really the right body, so they have rejected the offer. This seemed strange to me because if the government wanted to trick the family, they could give them cremains, or not even give his remains up. But not being Chinese, I don't understand this at all.
I asked Randy how close this was to him and whether he had heard about it at all. He answered that he thought he knew where it was in a fairly remote, undeveloped region, and when he asked some people he knew about it, they hadn't heard specifically about this, but were not surprised either. Their answers to him, though, were like, just like what happened in such and such a place last summer, earlier this year, etc.
Randy and I talked about this some more about the general state of affairs that lead to these 70,000 rural protests last year alone that the PRC government reports required some police intervention. Randy wanted to make sure that I understood that many of these incidents are happening in undeveloped areas where the central government is working towards developing. Not necessarily Dongzhou (probably, though, but a lot these villages where you read about these protests, the protesters are frequently very poor, sustenance farmers and fishermen that are suddenly faced with the trickling in of industrial development. Now, while I compared Dongzhou to the Xian diocese story, I don't know if Randy would find that as accurate a comparison based on what he's hearing about in Shekou. In Dongzhou, one of the points of contention was access to a salt water lake that the villagers had fished for generations. Obviously, with a history of no personal property ownership in China, no one who owned the lake is screaming about eminent domain, or not being paid enough to give up his property. But it is the access to the lake that is a problem. Randy says he hears that this is a big thing in the rural areas, the access to lakes or foresty areas or whatever being lost with inadequate (if at all)compensation. And the access isn't for sport--it's for food. The central government of the PRC has announced that they want to spread the economic development as widely as possible. Their vision is that all regions will experience some economic growth. The growing pains, however, will be enormous.
Minnie Chan in the online version of the South China Morning Post is reporting that nine villagers have been arrested. What is odd, the locals note, is that their pictures were not shown on TV. Normally, when there is a big arrest like this, their faces are shown on TV to make a big show of the round-up. This time that was not the case. Perhaps this adds doubt to who is really alive and in custody and who is really dead? I don't know.
The widow of one of the villagers killed was offered 50,000 RMB as compensation on the condition that the body was buried immediately and under official supervision. The family of course suspects that the body was tampered with, or isn't really the right body, so they have rejected the offer. This seemed strange to me because if the government wanted to trick the family, they could give them cremains, or not even give his remains up. But not being Chinese, I don't understand this at all.
I asked Randy how close this was to him and whether he had heard about it at all. He answered that he thought he knew where it was in a fairly remote, undeveloped region, and when he asked some people he knew about it, they hadn't heard specifically about this, but were not surprised either. Their answers to him, though, were like, just like what happened in such and such a place last summer, earlier this year, etc.
Randy and I talked about this some more about the general state of affairs that lead to these 70,000 rural protests last year alone that the PRC government reports required some police intervention. Randy wanted to make sure that I understood that many of these incidents are happening in undeveloped areas where the central government is working towards developing. Not necessarily Dongzhou (probably, though, but a lot these villages where you read about these protests, the protesters are frequently very poor, sustenance farmers and fishermen that are suddenly faced with the trickling in of industrial development. Now, while I compared Dongzhou to the Xian diocese story, I don't know if Randy would find that as accurate a comparison based on what he's hearing about in Shekou. In Dongzhou, one of the points of contention was access to a salt water lake that the villagers had fished for generations. Obviously, with a history of no personal property ownership in China, no one who owned the lake is screaming about eminent domain, or not being paid enough to give up his property. But it is the access to the lake that is a problem. Randy says he hears that this is a big thing in the rural areas, the access to lakes or foresty areas or whatever being lost with inadequate (if at all)compensation. And the access isn't for sport--it's for food. The central government of the PRC has announced that they want to spread the economic development as widely as possible. Their vision is that all regions will experience some economic growth. The growing pains, however, will be enormous.
Comments