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Bootleg deaths spark village rioting in Hunan
By Edward Cody (Washingtonpost.com)
Updated: 2005-12-05 10:32
It was well past midnight when the peasants finished piling up fragrant
tobacco leaves, more than 1,000 pounds of them stacked 10 feet high on the back
of a rented truck. In the still darkness, they pulled slowly out of Shangdeng
village, bumped along a dirt road for a few miles and then, the engine whining,
turned onto the paved highway and picked up speed.
Deng Suilong, the
older brother of Deng Silong, one of the two slain men, was part of the
crowd that stormed Yantang city hall in protest. [The Washington
Post] | The smugglers had about $750 worth of the
prized tobacco that peasants here in southern Hunan province call their "golden
leaves." They were on their way to a predawn rendezvous with underground buyers,
who would pay a 30 percent premium to get their hands on tobacco outside the
official monopoly that is strictly enforced by the Chinese government.
The peasants of Shangdeng, who cultivate the soft slopes 200 miles south of
Changsha, the provincial capital, were not making the run down China's Thunder
Road for the first time. Tobacco smuggling has become a tradition here. But in
the early morning of Aug. 30, it went quickly and tragically wrong.
Someone -- a spy, villagers said -- had tipped off the local anti-smuggling
squad. About 20 policemen and Communist Party and government officials from
nearby Yantang town lay in ambush only a mile down the highway. According to an
official account, the bootleg tobacco was seized according to law. But in the
process, the account acknowledged, two of the smugglers, Deng Jianlan, 33, and
Deng Silong, 38, ended up dead, their badly damaged bodies left beside the road.
Local officials described the deaths as a pair of freak accidents. But the
villagers of Shangdeng said they were convinced the two men were killed
deliberately by members of the anti-smuggling squad who were carrying iron bars.
Outraged b y the news, relatives, friends and fellow smugglers gathered shortly
after dawn in front of Yantang city hall, demanding an explanation from
municipal authorities with jurisdiction over local villages.
The white-tiled building was padlocked tight and nobody came out to face the
crowd, recalled Deng Suilong, 54, Deng Silong's older brother. The number of
protesters swelled quickly to several hundred, he said, which meant that most of
the men from among Shangdeng's 1,000 residents were on hand and angry. "They
were all yelling and screaming," said one of the men present, who declined to
provide his name for fear of prosecution.
Their rage growing, the peasants broke down the door to city hall and burst
inside, witnesses said. They rushed up to the main offices on the second floor,
and some of them began sacking everything in sight. The building's blue-tinted
windows were shattered on several of the five stories, the witnesses said, and
tables, chairs and desks were broken into pieces.
When the Yantang Communist Party secretary, Liu Tangxiong, showed up with
several other officials to try and calm the mob, a local official said, the
peasants knocked his front teeth out and continued their rampage unhindered
until it was time to go home for a late breakfast.
The violence in Yantang, although small in scale, was part of what officials
say is a growing trend of assaults against police, officials and government
property in China. The Public Security Ministry estimates that more than 1,800
policemen were attacked in the line of duty in the first six months of this
year, sharply up from previous years. A ministry spokesman, Wu Heping, was
quoted by the official party organ, the People's Daily, as saying that 23
policemen were killed in a broad range of clashes with "criminal suspects or
people intending to interfere with law enforcement through violence."
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