The government of a southern Chinese city where eight people were killed in a clash over land reclamation has said that some of the dead were construction workers who were bound and burned to death by villagers.
That grim allegation adds to the widespread shock over the death toll in the confrontation between developers and local residents on Tuesday in a rural area of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Standoffs in China between forces pushing for land reclamation — usually developers and local governments — and residents who want to protect their property or win higher compensation can lead to violence and even deaths, but rarely are so many killed. The death toll included six workers and two residents. Another 18 were injured.
Four of the workers who were killed were part of a group who had been grabbed by residents, tied up and beaten, the Kunming government said Thursday. The men were doused in gasoline and then set on fire when the residents went to attack more workers with Molotov cocktails, the authorities said.
Villagers interviewed by a reporter from The Beijing News, a liberal newspaper based in the Chinese capital, acknowledged that workers had been bound and beaten but denied that they had been intentionally set on fire. The residents claimed that the men had been immolated when other workers, who had not been captured, threw Molotov cocktails. “I didn’t see anyone pour gasoline on them, and I don’t think anyone wanted to set them on fire,” a villager named Zhou Lihui was quoted as saying. “All we had were hoes and sticks.”
The villagers said that they had called the police six times, but that no officers arrived before the clash began.
The dark uniforms, helmets, police shields and tear gas used by the workers raised questions from some Chinese news media outlets that they may have been auxiliary police sent by the local government. The village residents interviewed by The Beijing News claimed the captured workers said they had been recruited by local mafia and paid 300 renminbi a day, or about $50, to intimidate residents into ending their resistance to the project.
The conflict stemmed from efforts to build a logistics terminal for distribution of goods in Jinning, a county under Kunming’s jurisdiction. The two sides had clashed previously, as villagers sought better compensation for the requisition of about 500 acres and complained about flooding they believe was linked to the project. Work had been effectively blocked since May, and the conflict surged Tuesday as the developers sought to resume work, the Kunming government said.
In a commentary Friday, The Beijing News wrote that while both developers and residents were to blame in the incident, the local government appeared to have shrugged off its responsibility to ensure the dispute was handled peacefully:
In this tragedy, no matter if villagers’ explanation of low compensation is correct or not, they have no right to illegally detain people and no right to deprive them of their lives. By the same reasoning, just because the workers’ side wants to protect its legal rights and restart construction doesn’t mean they can threaten and kill villagers.
The government’s most fundamental role is to serve as a night watchman, to protect social order, to prevent against vengeance and “blood for blood.” In this tragedy the people who participated in the violence or organized mobs to harm and kill people should all be punished according to the law. But the public must also ask, when hundreds of people gather for an armed clash, where are the police? Have the local government and police failed to do their duty?