Chinese city rebellion against rich & powerful

In their eyes, the party that assumed power in China 56
years ago as a champion of peasants and workers seems to
have switched sides, backing capitalist businessmen instead
of the poor as part of a new get-rich ethic in which bribery
plays a big role.

Recently, the resentment has exploded into violent protests,
despite draconian laws against attempts to challenge the
party's rule. Although press censorship prevents an
independent count, the government-funded Ta Kung Pao
newspaper said Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang
estimated that 3.76 million Chinese were involved in 74,000
"mass incidents" during 2004.

http://washingtonpost.com
A Chinese City's Rage At the Rich And Powerful
Beating of Student Sparks Riot, Looting
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 1, 2005
A01

CHIZHOU, China -- Liu Liang, a slightly built computer
student with big glasses, was home in Chizhou for summer
vacation. At about 2:30 on the hot afternoon of June 26, he
was pedaling his bicycle by the downtown vegetable market on
Cuibai Street.

Driving down the same street in his new-looking black Toyota
sedan was Wu Junxing, deputy manager of a hospital in nearby
Anqing. Wu, accompanied by a friend and two bodyguards, had
come to Chizhou that day to attend opening ceremonies of a
new private hospital and, associates said, survey the market
to judge whether he should invest in his own facility.

Liu's bicycle and Wu's shiny four-door sedan collided,
sending Liu crashing to the ground. Almost immediately,
witnesses said, Liu, 22, and Wu, 34, began arguing over who
was at fault. In the heat of the dispute, they said, Liu
damaged one of Wu's side-view mirrors, prompting Wu's
muscular bodyguards to burst from the car and beat the
skinny young man senseless, leaving him bleeding from his
mouth and ears.

The beating, part of a minor traffic incident on a slow
Sunday afternoon, ignited a spark of anger. The spark became
a riot, evolving over eight chaotic hours into an expression
of rage against the Chinese Communist Party's new
fascination with businessmen, profits and economic growth.

After they saw what happened to Liu, Chizhou's
self-described "common people" rose up against what they
perceived as their local government's willingness to side
with rich outside investors against Chizhou's own. By the
end of the evening, 10,000 Chizhou residents had filled the
streets, some of whom torched police cars, pelted
overwhelmed anti-riot troops with stones and looted a nearby
supermarket bare.

The violence in downtown Chizhou startled the leaders of
this forward-looking city of 120,000, set in the rich
alluvial farmland of Anhui province near the Yangtze River,
about 250 miles southwest of Shanghai. Dismayed city
officials deplored the impact on their campaign to attract
investment and broaden Chizhou's economic base. "Illicit
elements" were to blame, they said.

But the riot here, like a growing number of flare-ups in
other Chinese cities, was in fact directed against the
flourishing alliance of Communist Party officials and
well-connected businessmen that runs Chizhou. Before calm
returned to the streets, the disturbance had become a
political rebellion against the increasingly intimate
connection in modern China between big money and Communist
government.

"When anger boils up in your heart so long, it has to
burst," said a Chizhou man who was part of the crowd that night.

As the Communist Party strives to continue the swift
economic growth that has become its new ideology, the
official partnership with private business has generated
resentment among those left behind: farmers whose fields
become industrial parks, workers whose socialist-era
factories go under, youths with assembly-line jobs at $60 a
month.

In their eyes, the party that assumed power in China 56
years ago as a champion of peasants and workers seems to
have switched sides, backing capitalist businessmen instead
of the poor as part of a new get-rich ethic in which bribery
plays a big role.

Recently, the resentment has exploded into violent protests,
despite draconian laws against attempts to challenge the
party's rule. Although press censorship prevents an
independent count, the government-funded Ta Kung Pao
newspaper said Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang
estimated that 3.76 million Chinese were involved in 74,000
"mass incidents" during 2004.

Preventing the unrest from spreading has become a major
preoccupation of President Hu Jintao and his lieutenants,
who regularly call for stability as a condition for further
economic progress. The stakes, they know, are high. If the
violent outbursts get out of control, they could undermine
China's boom and, ultimately, the party's grip on power.

A Rich Outsider

Wu and his companions had just finished a long, beer-soaked
lunch at a sidewalk restaurant when the collision with Liu
occurred, according to Cao Yefa, an official at the Chizhou
Communist Party Propaganda Department.

Wu's two bodyguards were security personnel from Xie He
Hospital in Anqing. As described by witnesses, both wore
their hair in military-style brush-cuts and their black
T-shirts exposed muscular arms decorated with tattoos.

As Liu fell to the street, the two guards continued kicking
him with pointed-toe shoes, the witnesses related. Three
dozen shopkeepers from the nearby vegetable market and idle
motorcycle taxi drivers gathered around and shouted at the
pair to stop.

Wu's Toyota, they pointed out later, carried license plates
identifying it as registered in neighboring Jiangsu
province. Wu, it seemed, was one of the rich outsiders
Chizhou's investment-hungry leaders were eager to seduce.
Moreover, when policemen from the nearby substation showed
up to investigate, officials and witnesses reported, Wu and
his bodyguards refused to cooperate -- the first signs of an
arrogance that participants said helped spark the violence.

Wu, still in his vehicle, waved off questions impatiently,
witnesses recalled, saying: "Don't touch me. Get away from
my car."

The policemen, two duty officers and an auxiliary, put the
badly beaten Liu into a taxi and dispatched him to Chizhou
People's Hospital, where doctors later said he had a broken
jaw, a broken nose and multiple contusions. According to
witnesses and official accounts, the policemen ordered Wu
and his three companions to follow them to their substation:
about 330 yards down Cuibai Street, a right turn at the
Donghuadong Supermarket and 54 yards down Quipu Street.

Agitated by Wu's attitude and the sight of Liu's bloody
injuries, the motorcycle drivers and vegetable merchants
followed on foot, joined by a growing number of bystanders.
Members of the crowd pulled out their cell phones to call
friends and relatives, swelling their numbers further. By
3:30, witnesses recalled, several thousand people were
gathered around the station.

One of those who showed up was Liu's father, who, witnesses
said, began arguing with Wu and the bodyguards. Enraged, he
grabbed a motorcycle lock and, swinging it over and over,
shattered Wu's windshield, the witnesses reported. Police
officers, who numbered only three, did not react.

The hostile mood swiftly escalated, those present said. The
anger was nurtured by rumors, passed along in person or in
cell phone conversations that, in the absence of official
declarations, were the only source of information.

Many were told that Liu was a 16-year-old student on his way
home from final exams, and that he had died of his wounds
before reaching the hospital. Others were told the two
bodyguards had stabbed a motorcycle driver who was trying to
protect the injured youth. And most were told that Wu was
heard telling police there was nothing to worry about
because, by handing $35,000 to Liu's father, he could make
the problem go away.

The actions of Wu and his companions further enraged the
crowd, witnesses said. Cao, the party propaganda official,
said the four men openly defied the three policemen and,
within earshot of the crowd, cursed them in accents that
identified them as outsiders.

"Maybe it's because they are rich people, rich but without
education," Cao said in a telephone interview. "They don't
know how to behave, and they look down on others."

'How Dare They?'

Members of the crowd, which was still growing as the
confrontation continued, demanded that the three police
officers turn Wu and his companions over to them, according
to several people present at the time. Instead, the four men
were taken inside the station. But the two bodyguards
returned to the car and took out long knives, presumably to
protect themselves, according to witnesses and official
accounts.

"These guys tried to kill one of our sons," people in the
mob shouted, according to those present. "How dare they?
Let's get them."

The outnumbered police officers persuaded the two toughs to
give up their knives and bundled them into a police van to
be transported to the central jail. But in a gesture that
further outraged the crowd, they were not handcuffed. To
many of those standing in the street, the two were being
taken away for their safety, not for punishment.

"Why are you letting them go?" people shouted, according to
accounts from several witnesses. A motorcycle driver who was
in the crowd was still outraged about the lack of handcuffs
a week later. "That's illegal," he shouted in a long
conversation during which he described the scene. "Why
didn't the police handcuff them?" he asked. "They were so
rich, so they weren't afraid of anything."

Wu, meanwhile, was seen looking at the crowd from a
second-floor window above the police station, smiling
dismissively. "When I saw him smirk at the crowd, I was
really mad," said the driver, a sinewy man wearing only
shorts and a tank-style undershirt.

Anger boiling, the crowd blocked the police van, still
demanding to get its hands on the two bodyguards. About 50
anti-riot police showed up wearing helmets and camouflage
fatigues, witnesses said. They were met by a volley of
stones and bottles from a mob that now numbered around
10,000. The anti-riot forces hustled the bodyguards to
safety, the witnesses said, but the unarmed officers did not
have the numbers to bring the situation under control.

Four were seriously injured and the rest swiftly drew back,
authorities said. The injured, officials said, were
hospitalized for more than a week. "They were afraid of
dying," said one member of the crowd who, like others
interviewed, refused to reveal his name for fear of being
arrested.

By 5 p.m., the emboldened mob turned its attention to Wu's
sedan, overturning it, pummeling it with rocks and then
setting it afire with cigarette lighters, the witnesses
said. Two police cars suffered the same fate an hour later,
they added, and the police van was also trashed and set
ablaze. The fires were so hot they scorched the entrance to
the police station, Cao said.

The crowd cheered and shouted at the sight of government
vehicles burning. Several of the people there that evening
said that the riot had become a battle against a system that
encouraged local police to protect rich outsiders instead of
sticking up for a local boy. A number of those present,
interviewed at length, referred to the crowd as "the common
people," a term frequently used in China to distinguish
ordinary civilians from the rich or the powerful.

"They are rich people, and they always bully us poor
people," said one of the legions of men who ferry customers
around Chizhou on the back of motorcycles and who played a
prominent role in the violence.

Supermarket Ransacked

About that time, one of the rich and powerful got a fateful
telephone call. Zhou Qingrao, who owns the Donghuadong
Supermarket, said police inside the besieged station phoned
to ask for some water. Zhou immediately walked over a
six-pack of mineral water in what, for him, was a natural
gesture of solidarity. The gesture made him the next target.

Zhou, a Communist Party stalwart and a former delegate to
the People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing,
also heads the Chizhou Investors Association; his company
owns Donghuadong and four other Kmart-type stores in the
region. Originally from Hangzhou, 150 miles to the east,
Zhou since arriving here 20 years ago had become a prominent
part of the party-business establishment that the angry
people in the street were out to attack.

"I heard somebody screaming, 'The owner of Donghuadong
Supermarket is from Zhejiang province. Let's get rid of
it,'" he recalled in a telephone interview. "I yelled to
them, 'You cannot do that. I have been here more than 20
years. I have made a lot of contributions to Chizhou.' But
they wouldn't listen to me."

Instead, after a sudden cloudburst let up, they attacked.
Shouting in unison, "One, two, three," using crowbars and
hard-toed shoes, Zhou recalled, they smashed down the glass
door and poured in.

For more than three hours that sultry evening, the looters
helped themselves. They carried away bottles of rice wine
and beer. They scooped up handfuls of silver earrings and
gold necklaces. They hauled away microwave ovens and,
according to witnesses, fled into the darkness with
blankets, makeup, perfume, soap and even pots and pans.

"Pretty soon everything was gone," said a motorcycle taxi
driver who was in the crowd.

Only after 11 p.m., when 700 more riot police showed up from
the Anhui provincial capital, Hefei, did the looting end. By
then the first floor was a shambles, emptied of its wares.

Since then, police have made a dozen arrests, authorities
said, including three people accused in connection with the
beating of Liu, who was hospitalized for two weeks. Police
made several videos of the riot, according to witnesses and
official accounts. Motorcycle drivers said more than 30
people have been called in to account for actions captured
on the tapes.

The city's new Communist Party secretary, Tong Huawei, who
by coincidence took over the day after the riot, called in
investors July 7 and assured them that, despite the
violence, he guaranteed a good environment for business.
"You can count on us," he said, according to Zhou, who was
present at the meeting.

Tong and the Chizhou mayor, Xie Dexin, reiterated their
support for private investors the next day at a ceremony
marking Donghuadong's reopening after repairs and
restocking. Investors are always encouraged to invest in
Chizhou, they said, according to an account of their
speeches in the official newspaper, and this city will
always be a great place for business.

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.