Wukan Revolt Shows China's Need for Fair Procedures to Resolve Conflict

In the face of social tensions, the government aims to keep isolated protests from mushrooming into much larger problems, and for its responsiveness in handling the Wukan revolt, the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee deserves credit. Despite this, the episode is still cause for concern.
 
The Wukan revolt, which escalated into an intense confrontation between villagers and government officials and lasted for several months, has subsided. The Guangdong Provincial Working Group went to the village and responded to the appeals of angry villagers.
 
The cause of the episode and its evolution are straightforward. Governance in the village was undemocratic, and land rights were infringed upon. Villagers called for redress, but their concerns were ignored. Similar circumstances can be found in all mass incidents involving land disputes in rural areas. But the fact a fairly minor dispute evolved into a huge confrontation that caught the world's attention and required the involvement of the provincial party committee and the sending of a working group to resolve it suggests that the Wukan dispute exposed a failure of important mechanisms and institutions. This is worthy of attention.
 
In reviewing the episode, there are three things that we feel are regrettable.
The first is the government's indifference to the appeals of the masses. Large-scale land grabs occurred repeatedly in Wukan, and farmers received little compensation. In 2009, villagers began reporting their problems to the local government. But when the entire village boiled over and a villager died in police custody, local officials still responded with suppression. Even after the involvement of the provincial party committee, local officials were still reprimanding villagers for "disregarding the overall situation."
 
Our second regret is that backwards political thinking is so deeply rooted. The cause of the dispute is clear. Even though the confrontation evolved into a large-scale demonstration involving some radical behavior by individuals, the demands of the villagers were still limited to land issues. But, local officials insisted on blaming "rotten foreign media" for turning a common local dispute into a much larger issue. This only aggravated the problem.
 
The third is the obvious difficulty involved in transforming China's development pattern. The underlying cause of the Wukan saga was the conflict between villagers' land rights and extensive development that requires land to increase economic growth. The government's adherence to this pattern caused it to repeatedly ignore the reasonable appeals of villagers. As long as the government cooperates so closely with developers – to the profit of both – it will always employ strong measures to defend its interests.
 
Wang Yang, secretary of provincial party committee, said the Wukan episode may have seemed accidental, but it was in fact inevitable. Thus, the evolution of the confrontation deserves a closer look.
 
All such land disputes in China have a certain predictable quality. First, there is a small incident when individual or collective interests are damaged. These are normal disputes, but some, as in Wukan, mushroom into larger confrontations. One cannot help but ask whether there is a way to keep this from happening. Our thinking on this issue has brought about three concerns.