For Chinese, Peasant Revolt Is Rare Victory

Angry residents overturned several police cars April 10 during a peasant revolt in which police officers carrying out a raid were beaten and driven away by 20,000 residents protesting an industrial park that was eventually shut down. (Photos For The Washington Post)

At the same time, the witnesses added, the officials warned that the protest constituted an illegal disturbance of the public order. Moreover, an activist reported, eight villagers were detained after the officials left, accused of setting off firecrackers to announce that the high-ranking officials had arrived.

The warning system was in place.

Farmer's Wrath

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When the firecrackers went off April 10, Xu said, about 50 policewomen and riot police burst into the tent she shared with 20 other elderly villagers. The policewomen were shouting orders, Xu recalled, but the elderly protesters could not understand. The shouts were in Mandarin, China's official language, and the retired farmers and their wives spoke only a local dialect.

"Then they tried to pull us out," Xu recalled, sitting in the courtyard of her rickety wooden farmhouse while a middle-aged relative interpreted her recollections into Mandarin. "Those who refused to go were beaten," she added, showing bruises on her left thigh.

As the policewomen and riot police, armed with helmets and plastic shields, dragged the protesters outside, other officers set about destroying the tents with shears and machetes, witnesses said. The flimsy constructions swiftly collapsed into piles of tarp and bamboo.

Xu said she was taken to the local clinic to have her leg examined. But some of the women who had been pulled from the tents sat down in the concrete roadway and refused to leave, blocking police who were trying to remove the debris in a truck, witnesses said.

Most of the protesters who had flooded the area, meanwhile, were being kept behind crime-scene tape, said a pair of farmers who joined the crowd as the women staged their sit-in around 5:30 a.m. But the sight of the elderly protesters being whacked by police trying to clear the road produced a wave of anger among the excited peasants, they said, and many started hurling stones across the tape.

Another protester said the crowd exploded in anger when one of the factory managers, identified as Wang Yuejin, tried to persuade police to take it easy on the elderly women and got hit with a truncheon for his trouble. At about the same time, he said, a villager in the crowd, Wang Hongfa, was struck by a stone launched by the besieged policemen, opening a gash above his left eye. In addition, rumors -- later proved untrue -- began to circulate that two elderly women had died from injuries inflicted by riot police.

"After that, people got really mad," the protester recalled.

'Other Face' of Police

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As farmers' stones rained down and the crowd pressed closer at about 6:30 a.m., the police lines collapsed and panicked officers ran for their staging ground at a schoolyard 150 yards from the tents. Some of them were beaten on the way but many made it into the walled compound and locked the doors.

Two of the farmers, with the calloused hands and dirt-lined fingernails of those who till the earth, later recalled what happened next during a long conversation in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by peach trees. It took several hundred villagers to push down the eight-foot-high stone wall surrounding the courtyard, they said, but it collapsed within a few minutes once they all put their shoulders to the task.

As farmers rushed through the 20-foot-wide breach, they found many of the policewomen had taken refuge in buses surrounded by male riot police with shields and batons. But the surging crowd of howling farmers frightened the men away, the pair said, and the buses swiftly emptied as well.