Post by contini on Mar 18, 2007 7:23:41 GMT -5
By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer Sat Mar 17, 3:35 AM ET
BEIJING - It started with a small protest over a twofold increase in bus fares in a central Chinese village and escalated into a bloody clash between 20,000 farmers and police armed with batons. The melee in Zhushan this week reportedly left one dead, dozens wounded and a police-enforced lock-down on the village nestled in the hills of Hunan province. All of which would likely have gone unreported under the Communist Party's tight grip on information.
Except Zhang Zilin was there.
The 22-year-old art teacher-turned-civil rights activist got a phone call from an irate villager. He took a public bus from his home in the provincial capital for the two-hour ride, and once in the village, tirelessly worked the phones, bringing reporters and other activists up to speed on the details.
"Our role in the Zhushan case and other cases is to report the truth and reveal it to the public," Zhang said Thursday, after being warned by police against talking to the media.
Zhang is part of a burgeoning breed of activists. Eager for social justice and linked by the Internet, they are challenging the party's once tight grip on political life and showing how its information monopoly has been shaken by a rapidly changing society.
"This is just unstoppable," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch based in Hong Kong. "These people are the embodiment of a nascent civil society. ... They represent Chinese citizens' aspirations for better rights protection. This is why we are seeing them cropping up across China."
Chinese leaders have in part contributed to this wave, invoking the need for social fairness in a society once egalitarian but now fractured by a yawning rich-poor divide.
"We need to make justice the most important value of the socialist system," Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters on Friday, shortly after China's national legislature approved beefed-up government programs for spending on education, health care and social security programs.
The grassroots movement — known as rights defense or "wei quan" in Chinese — took root in 2003, after police beat to death a young college graduate who was not carrying his residency papers. The government bowed to public outrage and curbed police powers for arbitrary detention, an unusual restraint on official authority and a move that energized socially conscious lawyers and scholars.
"We are now in the period of a social transition from an autocratic system to a democratic system," said Ai Xiaoming, a literature professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, a city in the southern province of Guangdong, who has at times advised activists. "Some local government officials don't know how to make the adjustment."
"Some have suppressed the people's protests in a forcible manner and even restricted the coverage of the media," she said. "Therefore, in some areas, we are seeing antagonism between the local people and the local governments."
Instances of ordinary citizens being galvanized into action are on the rise — with the aid of activists. In two heated disputes in two separate villages in Guangdong province — one over land compensations in Dongzhou, another to oust corrupt officials in Taishi — civil rights campaigners and lawyers advised villagers of their legal options.
In Zhushan, Zhang was an outspoken witness, describing indiscriminate beatings by officers carrying batons and steel rods and the anger of the mob as they burned police cars and chanted "Beat to death government dogs!"
A day later, Zhang says he was taken to dinner by provincial security agents and government officials, who warned him against talking to reporters.
Zhang remains unfazed, in part because he's not alone. He's part of the China Pan-Blue Alliance, a Web-based rights organization which started in 2005 and claims 2,000 registered members including college students, laid-off workers, teachers, journalists and lawyers.
Scattered across the country, its members recruit new volunteers for its cause of "promoting China's democratic process and pushing forward human rights," Zhang said. To that end, members donate money, pay for lawyers' fees and post reports of official abuses on the site.
Unlike activists in the 1980s who demanded political reform from the central government, "wei quan" focuses on issues the government often acknowledges are problems: AIDS prevention, urban redevelopment, rigged elections and environmental protection.
"This is completely different," said Li Jian, a civil rights campaigner who advised the villagers in the Dongzhou land dispute. He set up a Web site for people to exchange information and ideas on how to protect their own rights.
"Political activists only focus on their own political interests," said Li, who began his activism four years ago after his toy business was shut down for urban redevelopment. "We don't do our job for any purpose other than to help people protect themselves."
Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch, said the government has raised expectations of better protection of rights, including passing a law on Friday that offers some protection for private and public property.
But at the same time it is clamping down on lawyers, courts and the media — "all channels for the people to seek restitution and justice," he said.
"The avenues for seeking redress are being closed down so you have a disconnect between greater expectation ... and reality," Bequelin said. "This explains the deep friction in Chinese society."
That growing frustration, if left without an outlet, results in the bursts of anger that typically turn minor events, like Zhushan's fight over bus fares, into riots.
"And suddenly," Bequelin said, "boom, it explodes."