CHINA: Taishi, a small village on China's booming southern coast, has seen an experiment in grassroots democracy go horribly wrong since the arrival of hired thugs to squash any democratic impulses, culminating in a violent assault on a civil rights campaigner at the weekend.
Lu Banglie (35), a grassroots democracy activist who had been teaching Taishi villagers about their rights, was escorting a journalist from Britain's Guardian newspaper when he was pulled from the car and beaten by a gang of 20 assailants, some of them reportedly wearing police and army uniforms.
He endured serious injuries and appeared to be dead, but it now looks like he may have survived the beating, Jonathan Watts, the Guardian's China bureau chief, told The Irish Times. "We've spoken to people who say he's alive but we still need to get that confirmed."
Mr Lu, a member of a local legislature in the central province of Hubei, was believed to be in a hospital in his home town.
Recent months have seen increasingly bold actions by the rural poor to bring attention to grievances, from industrial pollution to corruption and illegal land seizures.
The row in Taishi, a Pearl River Delta village with a population of 2,000, has been going on since July. The villagers want mayor Chen Jinshen removed from office and investigated for allegations of embezzlement and fraud. They are trying to use Chinese law to get him "recalled", but efforts to oust Mr Chen have been hampered by violent opposition.
Several villagers were injured in clashes with police last month when they tried to stop officials from seizing accounting ledgers that they said contained evidence of corruption.
They have staged hunger strikes to press home their demands. To date there has been no official reaction on any of the events in Taishi.
Another civil rights campaigner, a lawyer who was helping the farmers, was detained last month, just one day after over 1,000 riot police stormed government offices and took away scores of villagers.
Analysts are watching events in Taishi to see how much they reflect what's happening nationwide.
The authorities have acknowledged that last year there were around 74,000 riots, or what the police refer to as "mass incidents", in China, and the Communist Party admits that the growing gap between the urban wealthy and the rural poor, combined with widespread corruption at local level, is leading to social unrest.
Trying to publicise the events in Taishi within China has proven difficult. As part of a widening internet crackdown, authorities have shut down an online discussion forum that reported on the anti-corruption protests.
The assault on Mr Lu happened just as a four-day closed-door meeting of the Communist Party's ruling 354-member Central Committee ended in Beijing.
Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao newspaper said the outcome was a call for "deepening reform of the political structure".
Just what impact the brutal attack on Mr Lu would have on this push for reform was unclear.
At the moment, China operates a limited form of local democracy in a small number of townships in selected areas of the country.
The party leadership has firmly ruled out Western-style democracy, saying China is not ready because the levels of education are not high enough. Some analysts say the Communist Party is particularly alarmed by the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and Russia and by the rise of democracy in post-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia.