It's not been confirmed yet, but there's news of another liberated village, this time Panhe in southern Zhejiang:
According to World Journal, the Wukan uprising’s ultimate success inspired Panhe villagers to decide to hold widespread demonstrations starting February 1. Since that time, the report continues, demonstrators have circled the village unmolested. The street demonstrations shown in photographic accounts include demonstrators waving banners with slogans such as, “Denounce the Local Panhe Government’s Deceit Of The Masses,” “Down With Corrupt Officials,” and “Reselling Land And Destroying Fertile Farmland Is A Heinous Crime.”
The Panhe story seems to follow the Wukan incident in every particular: corrupt officials, illegal land sales, corporate-Party thuggery and the eventual driving out of the local apparat. This might make one a bit suspicious, but then again the land seizure issue is an absolutely typical nexus for discontent. It may be that some of the details are different or not known and have been bent to fit now that MGIs are being looked at generally through the Wukan lens.
As we've said frequently here before, peasant self-organisation of this type is nothing new. It will expand to fit whatever vacuum is left available to it. The significant part of the story is that here, as in Wukan, the local Party representatives have left and, apparently, not returned.
Now the Wukan affair was settled when Guagndong Party boss Wang Yang intervened on the side of the villagers, and Wang's conciliatory approach to protest is part of his pitch for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee this year: he is, for better or worse, the MGI guy. As James commented in an earlier post, it's not going to do Wang much good if his approach is seen to be weakening the Communist Party's grassroots will to power; and this incident, if confirmed, will probably be seen as evidence for just that. What's more, with Bo Xilai harmed by the Wang Lijun affair, you have both of the most prominent experiments in governance discredited.
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