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Wukan’s democracy experiment comes to a crashing halt

HONG KONG — The tiny fishing enclave of Wukan drew international attention after villagers rose up in a land dispute five years ago yesterday, eventually securing a landmark local election in China. It has since become a cautionary tale for the nation’s democratic reformers.

Villagers, including schoolchildren, taking part in a march to demand the release of their village chief Lin Zuluan in Wukan. The village has become a cautionary tale for the country’s democratic reformers. Photo: Reuters

Villagers, including schoolchildren, taking part in a march to demand the release of their village chief Lin Zuluan in Wukan. The village has become a cautionary tale for the country’s democratic reformers. Photo: Reuters

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HONG KONG — The tiny fishing enclave of Wukan drew international attention after villagers rose up in a land dispute five years ago yesterday, eventually securing a landmark local election in China. It has since become a cautionary tale for the nation’s democratic reformers.

The village about 150km north-east Hong Kong erupted anew this month, as protesters returned to the streets to challenge the graft conviction of one of the last remaining leaders elected after the 2011 uprising.

Videos on social media showed riot police clashing with brick-throwing demonstrators and raiding the homes of alleged organisers.

The authorities said on Sept 13 that they had detained at least 13 villagers in connection with their suspected role in the protests. The detentions underscore the collapse of what rights advocates once saw as the “Wukan model” for encouraging direct elections at the village level in China’s one-party political system.

Once voted into power, the inexperienced village leaders struggled to convince senior Communist party officials to return land sold by the previous committee. Bickering, protests and corruption allegations further undermined their effectiveness — and minimised the risk that demonstrations would spread to other localities.

“Eventually, the development of grassroots democracy is restricted by a country’s political ecosystem,” said Ms Zhu Lijia, a public affairs professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, a research institute under the State Council.

“Electoral democracy at the grassroots has almost no chance of success if the overall political environment is unfavourable.”

While the Communist Party rejects “Western-style” multi-party democracy and keeps a tight grip through local party committees, it instituted village elections as part of reforms in the 1980s. Former presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao advocated limited democracy within the bounds of one-party rule, including more openness and competition among its roughly 90 million members.

President Xi Jinping has placed greater emphasis on party discipline and started a broad crackdown on dissent since taking power in late 2012, raising more obstacles to communities seeking to follow Wukan’s lead.

The villagers in Wukan have sought change within China’s one-party system, rather than advocating for revolution. They attracted particular attention because the main dispute — the local government’s sale of collectively owned land — had become a source of wider unrest during China’s development boom.

After years of petitioning for the land’s return, crowds besieged government buildings on Sept 21, 2011, prompting a month-long stand-off. Eventually, the Guangdong provincial government stepped in to broker peace. They installed protest leader Lin Zuluan as village party chief, and allowed him and his fellow demonstrators to run for — and win — seats on the village committee in February 2012 elections. Wukan’s previous party chief had held the post for 41 years.

An editorial published before the election in the party’s People’s Daily newspaper said Wukan had “confirmed that democracy and supervision are effective weapons in controlling corruption”.

The protesters-turned-politicians quickly encountered difficulties in negotiations to recover Wukan’s lost land from Lufeng county and Donghai township, which oversee the village. Lin acknowledged in a September 2012 interview with Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper that he had been too naive, since some properties had been sold for revenues in deals supported by county and town officials.

The Lufeng county government has returned about 570ha of the 1,300ha sought by Wukan leadership, the official Nanfang Daily newspaper said on Sept 11.

Meanwhile, the village leaders’ own finances came under official scrutiny. Two of his former deputies were sentenced to prison in 2014 for bribery claims connected to public projects. Then, in June, Lin was accused of corruption — claims his wife dismissed as a set-up. Protesters went back into the streets in his defence.

“The implementation of grassroots democracy is often flawed and faces multiple problems, for example a fragile social foundation and weak sense of the rule of law among both the local government and the people,” said Prof Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology who studies rural China.

On Sept 8, a court in Guangdong’s Foshan city convicted Lin of taking 593,000 yuan (S$121,000) in bribes and sentenced him to three years in prison. The authorities sent in riot police to mop up the protests, firing rubber bullets and tear gas and searching door to door for alleged organisers.

“There remain deep contractions between local governance and hierarchical control, as well as contradictions between the economic interests of villagers and the economic and state interests of systems within which village communities exist,” said Mr Andrew Wedeman, director of China Studies at Georgia State University.

“I thus do not necessarily see Wukan as a harbinger of things to come so much as evidence that, the more things change, the more they stay the same.” BLOOMBERG

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