AFTER A tense stand-off lasting nearly two weeks, residents in the southern Chinese fishing village of Wukan have agreed to take down their protest banners and get back to normal, after winning key concessions from the authorities that will see detained protesters released and confiscated land returned to the farmers who owned it.
Tree trunks blocking roads in and out of the village were removed and armed police stepped down from their checkpoints.
Whether things do get back to normal depends on whether the government sticks to its promises, but whatever happens, the Wukan villagers have brought international attention to their situation and rattled the government’s nerves.
“Because this matter has been achieved, we won’t persist in making noise,” one of the protest organisers, Yang Semao, told an assembly of local representatives and reporters in the village of 20,000.
For months, Wukan has witnessed protests by locals angry at the sale of local agricultural land to developers without their consent.
Villagers drove out local officials and police almost two weeks ago after key village representatives were taken away. One detainee, a butcher named Xue Jinbo, died in custody. The police blamed heart failure, but locals believe he was tortured and beaten.
The authorities had taken a hard line during the protests, but were forced into concessions after villagers said earlier this week they would march to government headquarters in nearby Lufeng, which would have led to a more serious confrontation between police and villagers.
The government’s official negotiator Zhu Mingguo promised an impartial investigation into Mr Xue’s death, according to a report in the Southern Daily newspaper.
Some 300 villagers lined the road as Mr Zhu entered the village yesterday to make the deal. He pledged full transparency in addressing issues raised by the protests.
Protests in China have become relatively common, and tend to be linked to official corruption, high wages, land grabs or pollution.
The authorities have bought their way out of unrest before, conceding to wage demands or anger over land grabs to offset the prospect of unrest. But Wukan marks a milestone in a series of public displays of anger at corruption by unscrupulous cadres and unchecked development at the expense of the disenfranchised individual.
Normally local government gives in to demands, and then punishes ringleaders. However, Wukan was particularly high-profile, so it remains to be seen whether government can safely follow through on punishing those involved in organising the protests.
News of the unrest in Wukan was spread via the Weibo social network and there has been some contagion to other localities.
To the northeast of Wukan, the town of Haimen saw a second day of protests yesterday over a planned coal-fired power plant.
Unrest in Guangdong province and other economically advanced areas of China has a particularly jarring effect because it is comes from the rising middle classes that form the core support for the ruling Communist Party.
The Wukan protest has always been about local issues, and protesters have been very slow to criticise the party itself, expressing the belief that central government has their best interests at heart.