Straits Times
When appeals to the authorities over land grabs went unheeded, farmers picked up the video camera. China Bureau Chief Chua Chin Hon visited the south to see how they are using the media to fight their case in this second and final part of a series on China's rural unrest.
AOSHI VILLAGE (GUANGDONG) - WHEN the local government sent in a dozen bulldozers and excavators at the height of harvest two years ago to seize land for road construction, people in this unremarkable southern Chinese village did not reach for weapons.
Instead, one of them picked up a video camera and began filming how hundreds of police kept watch as the villagers' crops were destroyed and farmland ravaged on Sept 21, 2004.
The footage was then recorded onto DVDs, a copy of which was given to The Straits Times by Aoshi villagers. They declined to reveal the identity of the villager who made the video, citing probable reprisal.
The video, featuring jerky footage with snatches of conversation, is a piece of documentary evidence brimming with the raw emotions and anguish of the helpless farmers as the camera zoomed in repeatedly on the ravaged farmland, the bulldozers and the large numbers of police.
And when repeated petitions to the local and central government fell on deaf ears, Aoshi villagers posted their complaint on the Internet in the hope of drawing media attention.
'Only five of us in this village (of 260 people) know how to get on the Internet,' said Mr Li Weiming, one of the Aoshi peasants leading the petition movement to demand compensation for their land.
'So we pooled resources and managed to post a petition letter on the Internet.'
In this nascent rights movement, Chinese peasants are becoming more media savvy as they try to get past the government's chokehold on the state media so that their grievances can be heard.
These videos or photos taken by the peasants provide crucial documentary evidence if their complaints ever go to court, but more importantly, they provide a direct window into some of the atrocities committed against the peasants, said Professor Ai Xiaoming, who is well acquainted with the country's rural rights movement.
She cited the example of Shengyou village in northern Hebei province, where a villager filmed how hundreds of hired thugs attacked a group of farmers with shotguns, pipes and clubs last June to force them off land wanted by a state power plant.
'In the video, you can see that the level of primal violence is like that of an ancient battle field,' said Prof Ai, a literature professor at the Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, capital city of Guangdong province.
'Now, the peasants pick up their recorders before they do anything else. Even if a peasant cannot prevent his rights from being trampled upon right here, right now, at least now he has the evidence to prove it in court.'
Earlier this month, a Chinese court sentenced the former Communist Party chief of Dingzhou city, which administers Shengyou village, to life in prison for his role in the bloody attack.
The four thugs he hired were also sentenced to death for killing six Shengyou peasants.
In other instances, rights activists such as Prof Ai have taken on the role of documenting the injustices. Last year, she documented how peasants of Taishi village, in southern Guangdong province, were suppressed when they tried to remove their village leader on grounds of corruption.
The footage was subsequently used to produce a two-part DVD.
On a broader level, the growing media savvy of the peasants also presents a new challenge to the Communist Party in its bid to contain the growing number of incidents of rural unrest.
In the past, Beijing could regard the peasants as a backward lot whose interests were strictly parochial. Their grievances, no matter how intense, were isolated from the outside world, said Professor Jiang Wenran of the University of Alberta in Canada.
But modern communication and technology have changed that.
'That is why you see the severe crackdowns by the central government because they fear this kind of unrest would spread and make the peasant protests a widespread, united phenomenon,' said Prof Jiang.
'But for the moment, they think they have the situation under control.'
chinhon@sph.com.sg