Introduction
At the end of 2011, the world's attention turned towards the previously unknown village of Wukan in Guangdong Province. In a pattern that has become increasingly common in China over the last decade, citizens clashed with local officials who had colluded with property developers and arranged the sale of agricultural land without providing adequate compensation to its occupiers.Footnote 1 Protests in Wukan, which had first appeared in late September, suddenly exploded in early December after the mysterious death of Xue Jinbo, a representative of the villagers, after discussions with the local government. After Xue's death, thousands of outraged citizens surrounded government offices, drove local leaders from Wukan, and then pushed back security forces when they attempted to retake the village.Footnote 2 This led to a dramatic standoff between Wukan residents, some of whom had armed themselves with sticks and spears and formed roadblocks around the villages, and the local government, which surrounded the area with masses of police and anti-riot troops.Footnote 3 With international eyes focused on the situation, the heated standoff continued for ten days, until higher ranking provincial officials intervened, and negotiated a resolution with Wukan's protest leaders.
In many respects, the ‘siege of Wukan’ represents only one case among the tens of thousands of ‘mass incidents’ that have shaken Chinese localities over the last two decades. Like nearly all protests in the post-Tiananmen period, it was organized in relative isolation, aimed at locality-specific grievances, and operated in relative isolation from other, similarly aggrieved rural communities throughout China. And despite the substantial attention paid to Wukan, the incident neither evolved into a national movement nor posed any serious threat to the Chinese Communist Party's long-standing grip on power. However, as discussed in this article, it may represent a watershed in terms of the tactics applied by popular claimants. Unlike most of China's 180,000-plus mass incidents each year,Footnote 4 the organizers at Wukan made a concerted effort to voice their local claims not only to sympathetic high-ranking officials within China but also to a global audience. As discussed in this article, this effort to broadcast their message internationally helped Wukan claimants circumvent the containment strategy of county officials—who were bent on silencing and intimidating protest organizers at the local level. Once the Wukan story began to draw substantial public attention not only on the Chinese language blogosphere but also in mainstream English-language media outlets, pressure was exerted on the provincial leadership of Guangdong—led by the up-and-coming Wang Yang—to intervene from above. And act they did. Quickly and decisively, local officials were removed from their positions at the behest of provincial authorities, and Wukan residents were given concessions on protracted land rights issues and the opportunity to elect new village leaders. In subsequent collective actions in other parts of the country, claimants have appealed to foreign media in a similar way to Wukan protestors. This suggests this important tactical innovation may have diffused to new sites, expanding the repertoire of contention adopted by Chinese citizens.
Providing a focused case study of the 2011 Wukan rebellion, this article suggests that the successful outcome of the protest can best be conceptualized in terms of a four-level model. This includes the three-tiered pyramid of the Chinese state (local, provincial, and national) and a new, and largely novel, fourth dimension—the international level. After seeing their cause blocked at the local level and unable to exert pressure on authorities at higher levels of the Chinese state, the Wukan claimants pushed their concern horizontally, to journalists and bloggers outside of their community. In fact, they even assisted foreign reporters in covering the ongoing developments within their village. By broadcasting their message internationally and drawing attention to their plight, protest leaders were able to put pressure on the provincial and, most likely, national leadership, prompting an intervention from above in their favour. The close of this article will discuss the contribution the lessons of this incident makes to our broader understanding of popular contention in China and consider the limits and possibilities associated with the tactical innovation executed by the villagers of Wukan and its potential emulation at other sites of contention in the People's Republic of China. It suggests that while continuity seems to be maintained in the ‘cellular activist’,Footnote 5 through the ‘think national, blame local’Footnote 6 pattern of local protests, claimants may become more likely to extend their messaging more widely, incorporating foreign media and informal netizen reporters, to elicit favourable interventions from above.
The three levels of Chinese protest
In many popular understandings of the People's Republic of China and authoritarian regimes in general, the state is treated as a unitary, monolithic entity. Directives are issued from the central leadership and transmitted into action through the vehicle of an almost Orwellian, all-seeing Chinese Communist Party apparatus, where functionaries at the periphery implement policies in accordance with a party line dictated from the top. In some of the early reporting on the emerging situation at Wukan such understandings of the Chinese Communist Party monolith were evident, as foreign media reported, ‘Beijing [was] set to strike hard at [the] revolt’ (emphasis added).Footnote 7 Even after local elections elevated protest organizer, Lin Zuluan, to the position of party secretary of Wukan, the Financial Times reported, ‘Beijing appoints Wukan protest leader as official’ (emphasis added).Footnote 8
However, in contrast to the popular perception that China is characterized by a top-down, monolithic political system, scholars have long observed that, in practice, the system is both multilayered and extremely decentralized. As early as the mid-1990s, regional experts began identifying—with some trepidation—the growing autonomy of China's subnational units, specifically the provinces. Some, such as Hao and Lin, warned that the growing assertiveness of subnational authorities represented the weakening of central state capacity and might lead to regime destabilization.Footnote 9 Others were more optimistic about this trend. Montinola, Qian and WeingastFootnote 10 suggested the growing shift of power and resources from the centre to the periphery—a system they labelled ‘federalism, Chinese-style’—might in fact be contributing to China's impressive economic dynamism in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In a sentiment shared by Oi, Xia, and Landry, subnational authorities have assumed greater autonomous power over the developmental functions of the state as well as the delivery of public services.Footnote 11
From a comparative perspective, the extreme degree of decentralization in China has been remarkable. To use one measure—fiscal decentralization or the percentage of public spending at the subnational level—China's average of 54.84 per cent from 1995 to 1998 has been highly unusual. This level of decentralization has substantially outpaced the international average for non-democracies of 17.76 per cent.Footnote 12 By this measure, China is three times as decentralized as the typical authoritarian regime, whose leaders are usually quite reluctant to delegate such power to subnational agents who might one day serve as potential rivals. This growing decentralization has played a critical role in shaping the opportunities available for aggrieved citizens seeking to make claims vis-à-vis the state. As noted by Cai, the growing role of subnational governments in autonomously delivering public services and implementing state policies has meant that local officials are increasingly seen as being responsible for state actions and are consequently targeted by popular claimants.Footnote 13 This method of distributing public goods is closely linked to Beijing's decentralized system of social management. Instead of taking a more direct role in dealing with most outbreaks of social unrest, the central leadership has tended to delegate responsibility for dealing with outbreaks of unrest to lower level officials. In fact, dealing with protesters has become a central, even routine, task of local cadres. As noted by Edin, local cadres’ ability to maintain social order is a leading official performance criterion and plays an important role in determining whether or not they will receive promotions or demotions.Footnote 14
Because of this decentralized system of social management, the Chinese state should be understood not as a unitary but rather as a multilevel actor when it responds to incidents of popular unrest. Within China's complex labyrinth of subnational units and jurisdictions, this system encompasses three primary layers of authority: the national, provincial, and local levels of the state, each of which has its own particular interests and can play a pivotal role in determining protest outcomes. In seeking to address perceived grievances, popular claimants typically begin with authorized channels of interaction, such as filing petitions, before considering illegal and disruptive acts of contention.Footnote 15 However, in a political environment in which the rule of law is limited and often stacked in favour of powerbrokers with strong political connections, and high-ranking officials are either unable or unwilling to respond to most of the numerous petitions they receive on a regular basis, efforts to address problems through authorized channels often fail to achieve desired outcomes. Frustrated with these setbacks, claimants often engage in ‘boundary-spanning’ activities, using the state's own policies and laws—whose violation is often linked to claimants’ concerns—as well as a combination of lawful and illegal disruptive collective actions to draw attention to their specific cause.Footnote 16
When looking at the Chinese state as a multilayered entity, collective action campaigns typically begin at the local level then move upwards. Having been spurned in their earliest interactions with the state, claimants look upward in the state pyramid for allies. As noted by O’Brien and Li, the ‘structural opening’ presented by the gap between higher ranking leaders and local authorities has enabled protesters to frame their claims as being in step with the official policies and rights espoused by the centre. By positioning themselves against corrupt local cadres who are violating the centre's policies rather than the regime itself, claimants can assert moral leverage in interactions with the state, minimize personal risk, and maximize their likelihood of victory.Footnote 17 Cai has pointed out that this structural opening is, in fact, part of an overarching social management system in which local cadres function as the first responders to contentious action in China.Footnote 18
But while local cadres have broad and sweeping authority in terms of dealing with social management issues, this authority is ‘conditional’. If they fail to effectively resolve outbreaks of social unrest in their jurisdictions—either through concessions, coercion or some other means—this can prompt interventions from above, by higher ranking provincial or national officials.Footnote 19 In many circumstances, intervening higher authorities will respond to the demands of protesters by punishing local cadres. They may also directly provide concessions or, more likely, delegate this responsibility—requiring that local authorities use their own personnel and budgets to provide prescribed concessions.Footnote 20 Cai's dataset has suggested that such interventions play a clear role in improving the likelihood of popular claimants achieving their desired goals. Of the 261 major mass incidents observed in his sample, the central government intervened in 13 cases and provincial authorities in 17 others. Moreover, the success rate of mass collective actions reached an impressive 76.6 per cent when an intervention from above occurred compared to 23.8 per cent when no intervention took place.Footnote 21 In other words, attracting the attention of higher ranking officials and bringing about a top-down response is a common strategy of protestors in the People's Republic of China and it often delivers successful outcomes. Consequently, in interacting with the Chinese state, popular protest fits within the following dynamic: aggrieved citizens start with approved actions, such as petitioning. If they meet resistance from local state agents, then they expand their actions into boundary-spanning activities aimed at drawing the attention of higher ranking authorities and motivating interventions in their favour.
A fourth level?
While appealing for support in the higher reaches of the state is a significant odds-improving tactic, it is a difficult and often dangerous game to play. When faced with non-institutionalized collective action, local officials have large menu of possible alternatives, as laid out in Piven and Cloward's classic typology: ignore, conciliate, reform, or repress.Footnote 22 When local officials have interests that conflict with those of popular claimants or lack the resources needed to extend material concessions to them, conciliation and reform are undesirable. And once claimants have embarked on a strategy featuring attention-grapping contention action, pressures from above dictate that local officials cannot risk ignoring claimants. This would allow protests to attract the attention of their superiors. This motivates cadres to frequently resort to repression, raising the stakes of collective action for protest organizers.
Keenly aware of the pressures they face from within the regime, local cadres have every incentive to prevent information about local discontent from reaching their superiors, especially when it is motivated by their own corruption and malfeasance. As a result, while citizens in China frequently seek to formally or informally petition the provincial or national levels of government and alert them of local injustices, members of the regime often use censorship, intimidation, and even life-threatening violence to silence these efforts. As graphically catalogued in Chen and Wu's Will the Boat Sink the Water?, subnational officials use every imaginable tactic—from threats to torture and sometimes murder—to prevent local petitioners from reaching provincial capitals or Beijing.Footnote 23
As observed in recent, well-known cases of collective action in China, once citizens have embarked on campaigns of contentious action, they are initiating a two-sided informational struggle with local cadres in their specific communities. As claimants seek to draw public attention to their cause, officials at every level of the state work aggressively to prevent information related to disgruntled citizens and their protest actions from leaking out. For example, in advance of a 2007 campaign against a proposed chemical plant in Xiamen, city officials censored warnings issued by a local academic of the health threats posed by the plant and ordered the story banned from official media coverage. However, such efforts have been complicated by the openings presented by China's rapid advance into the digital age. In this case, enterprising citizens were able to circulate warnings of the plant's potential health effects and organize a major protest action by using text-messaging and blog technologies, outpacing an effort by city officials to block this alternative media avenue.Footnote 24 News of other protest actions, such as a May 2010 strike action at a Honda plant in Foshan, Guangdong,Footnote 25 a deadly train crash and botched rescue effort in Wenzhou in July 2011,Footnote 26 and a massive environmental protest in Dalian in August 2011Footnote 27 suddenly vanished from domestic news media outlets and were scrubbed from text messages and social media sites such as Weibo.
With regard to news related to sensitive issues such as major protests, unwanted stories that may compromise the regime's reputation or may lead to protest contagion often suddenly vanish from media outlets within the country. A national agency—the Chinese Communist Party's Central Publicity Department—works with the General Administration of Press and Publication and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television to ensure that sensitive news stories are restricted.Footnote 28 This central body issues directives to various media outlets throughout the country advising which stories should not receive coverage and how particularly controversial subjects should be dealt with.Footnote 29 And while the Central Publicity Department can, and does, arrest, fire or otherwise punish editors and journalists for violating various directives, the large majority of media control in the People's Republic of China is driven by self-censorship. Working in an environment with ‘deliberately fuzzy’ rules over what stories can be covered and how, which are enforced in a harsh and often arbitrary manner, most media outlets consciously avoid news items that might motivate an official response.Footnote 30 This opaqueness of rule making and enforcement further clouds the relationship between the various levels of the state media control apparatus.
While the existence of a central agency suggests that media supervision and control is managed from the top down, there are also local and provincial level propaganda departments attached to various subnational governments that often act directly in controlling local media. When it comes to specific sensitive issues, the censoring agent is hard to identify. According to Hassid, academic research has not yet been conducted on this push-and-pull between the various layers of the media management apparatus or where in this complex pyramid calls for censorship are made.Footnote 31 Therefore it is fairly unclear how autonomous the actions of local and provincial officials are in silencing news that runs counter to their particular interests.
Despite this lack of clarity on the issue of China's multilayered approach to media control, there is reason to believe that local officials frequently utilize their access to the media control agencies to suppress (or at least minimize) the profile of personally damaging stories—not only from the public but also their superiors within the regime. As noted above in Chen and Wu's study of rural petitioners, and in high-profile protests such as Xiamen's PX protest of 2007, local officials can and often do suppress unfavourable news before it can reach their superiors in the Chinese Communist Party.Footnote 32 Interestingly, as noted by Li, local officials in the past have banned local media outlets from covering negative news within their own localities, while permitting news reporters to cover negative stories in the jurisdictions of rival officials.Footnote 33
Independent efforts by subnational agents to suppress news coverage came to the fore during the 2008 Sanlu tainted milk scandal. Before the story broke, Sanlu had received complaints of sick infants as early as 2007. In August 2008 they issued a request to the Shijiazhuang city government, Hebei Province, which hosted the company's headquarters, asking city leaders to ‘increase control and coordination of the media’ on stories related to the tainted milk issue. Subsequently, local officials sat on the story for well over a month and did not report it to either provincial or national authorities.Footnote 34 In the meantime, at least 13,000 infants became seriously ill and several died as a result of drinking melamine-tainted formula. After the scandal appeared in the international media and created a massive public uproar within China, the central government ordered a probe of the local government's actions during the affair. Thereafter, Beijing dismissed a number of local leaders in Shijiazhuang city for covering up the story—although several of those officials were later reassigned to new positions within the regime.Footnote 35 From these cases, it seems that self-interested local officials do in fact assert a significant degree of autonomy when it comes to controlling the media within their jurisdictions, hiding unwanted stories from both the public and higher level officials. Beijing, moreover, has struggled with a serious principal-agent problem in which local cadres aggressively use their levers of power to censor news that is harmful to their specific interests but can also damage the country's reputation if left hidden from the national leadership.
Because of deliberate censorship by agents of the state and the tendency of media outlets to self-censor on sensitive topics, popular claimants are often prevented from drawing the attention of a potentially sympathetic audience at higher levels within the regime. With their efforts to publicize local injustices suppressed by local officials and absent from the domestic news media, claimants must reorient their demands to alternative avenues. This involves drawing and cultivating the attention of informal microbloggers within China and also media outlets outside the country. In the case of Wukan, the relationship between the foreign media and domestic microbloggers was mutually reinforcing. The latter picked up information and images from Weibo and other social networking sites to use in its reporting, and the former distributed articles and screenshots of foreign news media covering the Wukan incident, particularly from Chinese-language media in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan.Footnote 36 The persistent foreign attention given to Wukan helped to maintain its social media buzz within the country. Seemingly, in China's opaque media environment, where guidelines over the media's coverage of sensitive issues are deliberately fuzzy, and censorship can occur at many points in the media management apparatus, aggrieved citizens have little choice but to explore different channels to broadcast their messages, whether it be through informal microblogs or the foreign media.
Responding to domestic blockages by channelling claims outwards and internationally replicates some, but not all, of the elements of Keck and Sikkink's well known ‘boomerang effect’.Footnote 37 However, any boomerang initiated by Chinese claimants does not involve forming dense transnational linkages with international organizations, sympathetic foreign governments, foreign NGOs, and other allies to carry out sustained campaigns against a target government. Rather, any Chinese ‘boomerangs’ are more ephemeral and simply require temporarily drawing sufficient international public attention to a local cause to compel provincial officials to intervene from above—and quickly and quietly resolve the situation. Compared to the extended campaigns highlighted by Keck and Sikkink, such as the ‘disappearances’ in Argentina, resolving local outbursts of unrest requires comparably low-cost changes to the national regime's policies. Barring a spillover effect into other communities within China, these changes can be restricted to the particular local cause—land seized by a particular developer or local government, for example—and a specific community—such as Wukan, Dalian or Xiamen. For the claimants involved, a limited response in their favour is nevertheless a successful outcome. In the case of the Wukan claimants, it appears that campaigning on the fourth, international level improved their likelihood of victory by placing local concerns on the national and provincial-level policy agendas. This accelerated the existing pattern of higher levels officials intervening from above to support ‘rightful resisters’ positioning themselves against corruption and abuse by low-level officials.Footnote 38
The Wukan rebellion
Before late 2011, Wukan was a little-known coastal village home to 13,000 people in southern Guangdong. Like many other rural communities across China, residents struggled with the growing problem of under- or uncompensated land seizures. In collusion with property developers, primarily a large Hong Kong-based firm named Country Garden, local cadres had appropriated over 80 per cent of the farmland in Wukan and sold it off for a personal profit of over 700 million yuan (US$110 million). As compensation, each individual villager received only a pittance—550 yuan (US$87)—in exchange for losing the land many depended on for their livelihoods.Footnote 39
As early as 2009, aggrieved villagers had begun filing petitions of complaint to local and higher up officials on the issue of undercompensated land seizures.Footnote 40 After five petitions to county officials and seven to Guangdong Province went unheeded,Footnote 41 the citizens of Wukan began resorting to disruptive collective action to challenge the local leadership. Outraged that the land sales had continued and the unpopular local officials responsible for them continued to hold on to their positions through fraudulent elections, mobs of villagers took to the streets. Overturning police cars and surrounding government buildings until dispersed by riot police, the protestors drew the attention of county officials. Responding to the protest, county-level cadres removed the village Chinese Communist Party secretary and director, who had remained in power for 40 years, from their positions.Footnote 42
The September activities did not resolve the situation. The removal of village leaders did not result in the return of seized farmland or the payment of full compensation to dispossessed villagers. In the wake of the September riots, the county leader, Qiu Jinxiong, had invited Wukan residents to select 13 delegates to represent the village in a round of negotiations over the land rights issue.Footnote 43 After a number of meetings between county officials and village representatives, no resolution could be found. By 21 November, tensions had escalated and frustrated Wukan villagers organized a large-scale demonstration of 4,000 participants in front of the county government headquarters in neighbouring Lufeng. Four hundred protestors remained in a sit-in outside the building into the afternoon, agreeing to leave only after county officials appeared and pledged to investigate the issue.Footnote 44
The encounter with county officials did not trigger an investigation but rather resulted in a targeted crackdown against suspected protest organizers and efforts to intimidate the villagers. On Friday 9 December, unknown men suddenly appeared in the village in an unmarked minibus and seized five of the appointed village representatives of Wukan, including Xue Jinbo, a 43-year-old butcher. Subsequently, at least three unmarked buses approached the town but were repelled by villagers who chased them away.Footnote 45 At 4am on Sunday morning, as many as 1,000 police approached the village but were spotted by citizens who alerted the village. Wukan residents soon gathered en masse, and a large melee ensued. After police failed to disperse the crowd with water cannons and tear gas, they, along with the remaining local officials in the village, retreated from Wukan. A few miles away, the security forces established roadblocks on all roads coming into the village.Footnote 46 When these police lines began to prevent food and water from coming in and residents from coming out, Wukan soon began to resemble a city under siege.Footnote 47
On the inside, residents constructed their own barricades and even crafted homemade weapons to deter security forces from entering the village. In the absence of regular officials, an informal system of self-government emerged. Local citizens, such as Lin Zuluan, one of the original 13 village representatives, led daily assemblies in the city centre and gave speeches to rally the villagers who were in attendance. Moreover, these informal leaders organized a lookout system featuring watchmen armed with walkie-talkies to alert the villagers of any advancing security forces. They also deployed locals to smuggle in and distribute food from neighbouring villages by crossing over fields on foot.Footnote 48
The standoff suddenly intensified on Monday, when family members of Xue Jinbo, who had been summoned to a hospital in Shanwei city, were informed that Xue had died of a heart attack while in government custody.Footnote 49 Family members immediately disputed this claim of a natural death and, after being permitted to briefly view the body, reported seeing many signs of likely torture. Xue's corpse had a large number of cuts and bruises, dried blood coming from his nostrils, and thumbs that were broken backwards.Footnote 50 Once news of Xue's death reached Wukan, it inflamed the protestors and stiffened their resolve to hold out against the government siege until their demands were met.
Through indirect lines of communication with local officials and foreign media, protest organizers issued their demands. These included not only full compensation for the land seized by village officials but also an investigation into the death of Xue and the immediate release of the four village representatives still held by county officials.Footnote 51 Government forces led by Wu Zili, the county head, while attempting to starve out the running protest, also tried to incite division within the village. As they offered food and money to villagers to turn against the protest, local officials also deliberately placed blame for the unrest on specific individuals, such as Lin Zulian and Yang Semao, who were allegedly spreading false rumours and deliberately agitating others to protect themselves from punishment related to initiating earlier protests. While some villagers did defect in response to this strategy and even attempted to persuade others to the government's side,Footnote 52 the protest continued on into the week.
The information struggle
After months and years of ongoing conflict and resistance over the land rights issue in Wukan, protestors had little trust in the local authorities. Previous efforts to petition the county and provincial seats had fallen on deaf ears. Early protests in September had led only to failed negotiations and no movement on the issue of land compensation. After Xue Jinbo died while in the hands of the county government, his death became a symbol of the corruption and immorality of county officials—his image was plastered all over the village, and a memorial service was held for him by the protestors on 16 December.Footnote 53 Villagers interviewed in Wukan specifically voiced their distrust of local cadres and their wish that leaders in Beijing would hear of their plight and intervene on their behalf.Footnote 54 The mother of one of the four detained village representatives expressed her hope that the central leadership would save the villagers from local cadres: ‘Please tell the government in Beijing to help us before they kill us all.’Footnote 55 In a similar vein, a relative of Xue Jinbo's commented, ‘We call on the central government to come and investigate because we don't trust the local officials.’Footnote 56 In line with O’Brien and Li's depiction of rightful resisters, Wukan demonstrators espoused their loyalty to the regime, carrying banners reading, ‘We love the Communist Party’ and chanting ‘Long live the Communist Party’ to emphasize that their issue was with the injustices and abuses they suffered from law-breaking local cadres not the regime in general.Footnote 57
As protestors in Wukan sought to appeal to sympathetic higher level officials and other potential allies to place pressure on the local cadres encircling them, an information struggle ensued. Local cadres, with the likely assistance of the national media control apparatus, sought to prevent information on Wukan from leaking out, as protestors desperately fought to elude this blockage. As of 19 December, not one of over 200 Chinese language newspapers on the mainland was covering the ongoing developments in Wukan.Footnote 58 In spite of official efforts to silence news of the unrest in Wukan, the story was sporadically circulated within China via microblogging sites and search engines, such as Sina Weibo and Baidu. However, by 14 December, when users searched for ‘Wukan’ and other related search terms, they received the message: ‘According to relevant law, regulations and policies, search results. . .cannot be displayed.’Footnote 59 To continue to distribute their stories, users made use of alternative spellings of ‘Wukan’ such as ‘WK’ to elude the keyword searches of official censors.Footnote 60 However, as documented by the China Digital Times, web censors quickly detected and blocked even these alternate spellings, and ‘WK’, the most widely used alternative search term, had vanished from the web by 19 December.Footnote 61 As the occupation of Wukan proceeded into its fourth day, it became clear that provincial and national officials in Guangzhou and Beijing were content to adopt a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy. Domestic news coverage of the protest was banned across the country, and web censors were working aggressively to prevent netizens from publicizing the story via social media. Meanwhile, in step with most mass incidents, county officials were seemingly given a free hand to find a way to quietly resolve the protest so long as it remained a relatively low profile affair.
In spite of this blockage in the domestic arena, the residents of Wukan were able to find an alternative channel to broadcast their message and hopefully compel higher ranking officials to intervene on their behalf. With news coverage censored within China, a small number of foreign correspondents managed to enter Wukan with the assistance of local residents. They became a critical source of information about the ongoing protest and kept the story alive both within and outside of China. Tom Lasseter, a McClatchy journalist, was able to enter Wukan on 15 December ‘with the help of a local who had detailed knowledge of winding routes that skirted police positions in roads outside the village’.Footnote 62 A day earlier, Daily Telegraph correspondent Malcolm Moore was also able to enter the village by different means. He secured a car with blacked-out windows and happened to fall in behind a vehicle with government plates while approaching the police line surrounding Wukan. Assuming that his car was part of a government entourage, security forces waved his car through without identifying the passengers inside. Upon his approach to the village, village lookouts identified Moore as a foreign journalist and moved their roadblock of fallen trees to let him in.Footnote 63 The BBC's Martin Patience and a number of reporters from Hong Kong joined these two in Wukan, and foreign cameras and correspondents became a common sight in the protesting village by 15 December.Footnote 64 As noted by Michael Wines of the New York Times, once inside the village, residents ‘hail[ed] foreign journalists as visiting saviours, bombarding them with endless cigarettes, bowls of rice-and-seafood porridge and free rides on the backs of scooters’; they were ‘convinced that only reporting outside the state-run press [would] bring word of their plight to leaders in Beijing’.Footnote 65 Based on the sheer volume of recorded and videotaped interviews with villagers, gathered by the small number of foreign reporters inside Wukan, protestors were clearly willing and keen to speak with the foreign correspondents, despite the personal risks associated with this. According to an anonymous villager interviewed by Moore, the need to broadcast their story internationally was essential to circumventing domestic censorship. While admitting the serious personal dangers associated with speaking to foreign journalists, the villager commented, ‘We [nevertheless] need to speak to you to help get our story out, because the local media cannot cover this.’Footnote 66
This effort to widen the scope of local appeals achieved some clear, notable successes. Foreign reporting within Wukan helped publicize the protest both abroad and within China. First, the protest activity was covered by a number of reports in leading global news outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and CNN. For a mass incident in China, the intensity of coverage was remarkable, considering that tens of thousands of such incidents occur each year and receive little or no coverage either at home or abroad. To provide a rough sketch of the intensity of news coverage related to the incident, for general Google web searches in the period of 18–24 December 2011, the use of the term ‘Wukan’ vastly outnumbered searches for the terms ‘Dalian’ and ‘Wenzhou’ during their own peaks earlier in the year.Footnote 67 This is notable in that Dalian, already a well-known international city, witnessed a high-profile, large-scale protest against a chemical plant with participants numbering somewhere between 12,000 to 70,000 in mid-August.Footnote 68 Wenzhou saw a deadly train collision in July that also attracted a great deal of domestic and international scrutiny after local officials apparently botched a rescue effort and attempted to cover it up.Footnote 69 These rather well-publicized 2011 news events paled in comparison to the web searches centred on Wukan during its mid-December peak, with ‘Dalian’ peaking at 77 per cent (14–20 August) and Wenzhou at 56 per cent (24–30 July) of the number of searches for ‘Wukan’.Footnote 70 In short, by the third week of December, Wukan's protest was receiving an impressive level of international media attention, far outpacing not only the tens of thousands of other acts of contention that take place in China every year, but also some of the leading national-level scandals and news items that took place in the country in 2011.
Secondly, the extraordinary level of attention given to Wukan by the international media greatly enhanced the profile of the protest action within China. While the protest was blocked in all Chinese-language news media inside the countryFootnote 71 and web censors worked actively to block keywords related to the incident and remove online postings covering it, many Chinese netizens received news updates by accessing foreign press reports and worked to circulate them via social media platforms. Encouraged by the protest's high media profile in both English-language news and Chinese-language coverage in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore, microbloggers distributed screenshots of print newspapers covering Wukan, such as Hong Kong's Ming Pao and Apple Daily, on Sina Weibo, and other blogging platforms.Footnote 72 While it is unclear how many ordinary Chinese citizens other than active web-based netizens were aware of the developments in Wukan by mid-to-late December, international interest clearly played an important role in preventing the story from fading away in Chinese social media and allowing local authorities to quietly suppress the protest. In short, the continual stream of news generated by foreign journalists raised and maintained the international profile of the Wukan story, which eventually was circulated back into Chinese society via microbloggers.
As this pattern evolved, local officials became visibly unsettled by their inability to suppress news of the protest. They had sought to quietly wait out the protest, preventing outside supplies from entering the village and using offers of food and compensation to lure away participants and divide the demonstrators, but unwanted media attention facilitated by foreign journalists undermined this strategy. Frustrated with their inability to contain news of the protest, local officials lashed out at the villagers’ willingness to accommodate and speak with foreign journalists inside Wukan. At a special meeting in Lufeng, county official Zheng Yanxiong was videotaped condemning villagers’ complicity with the foreign media:
A responsible government like this, and you don't look to us. You look to a few rotten foreign media, and. . .foreign newspapers and foreign websites! You confuse good and bad entirely! What responsibility can they take? They can't accomplish anything! If you can't come together, socialism falls into chaos [and] then they’ll be happy!Footnote 73
Zheng's comments, which were echoed by a number of other local authorities, highlighted a potential risk faced by claimants in broadcasting their message internationally—namely that their protest actions would be branded as some kind of foreign conspiracy. By suggesting that local protestors were in league with foreign influences, county officials sought to undermine the effort of villagers to engage in rightful resistance. Rather than seeking the enforcement of national laws and receiving their due justice as citizens of China, the villagers could be cast as unpatriotic and seditious. Fortunately for the protestors in Wukan, however, their strategy of channelling their message through foreign media outlets soon paid off. The efforts of local officials to brand them as foreign subversives did not gain traction, and the public pressure on provincial authorities to act began to make an impact.
Following a common pattern in Chinese popular contention,Footnote 74 growing attention and the local government's inability to deal with the situation prompted an intervention from above. On the orders of Guangdong Province's party secretary, Wang Yang, two local officials were detained for questioning and a working group of provincial officials were deployed to negotiate with representatives of the protestors. Ultimately, these officials pledged to return some of the seized land to the villagers, release arrested protest organizers, launch an investigation into the death of Xue Jinbo, and allow the villagers to select a new leadership committee in forthcoming elections.Footnote 75 In February, 80 per cent of Wukan's residents went to the polls and elected Lin Zuluan, one of the protest organizers and a ‘wanted man’ only weeks before, as their new village party secretary.Footnote 76 More recently, it was announced in the state media that two former village leaders, Xue Chang and Chen Shunyi, would be expelled from the Chinese Communist Party because of corruption related to ‘ illegal transfers of land use rights, embezzling collective properties, accepting bribes and rigging village elections’ and forced to pay back US$44,000 in funds illegally obtained from land sales. In addition, 18 other village and county level officials linked to the land seizures were to be punished, although the specific punishments were not identified.Footnote 77
Implications of Wukan: The limits and possibilities of international appeals
While the long-term impact of events in Wukan remains unclear, the protest did achieve many of its stated goals in the short term. It also revealed the potential benefits for aggrieved citizens in making international appeals. By working closely with foreign journalists and more indirectly with Chinese netizens to circumvent blockage within the domestic arena, citizens can bring greater pressure to bear on higher ranking officials. In this case, the citizens of Wukan were able to place pressure on provincial officials to take long-standing local injustices seriously—namely undercompensated land seizures facilitated by the collusion of corrupt local officials with private property developers. A number of these local leaders were ultimately removed from office and replaced by preferred local residents, specifically the organizers of the protest themselves. Some compensation to the villagers has been promised, although the amount reportedly recovered from local officials (1.05 million yuan or US$68,000)Footnote 78 represents only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions taken from villagers in undercompensated land seizures over the years.
While appealing to the foreign media certainly appears to have benefited the claimants of Wukan, the broader implications of the protest and its choice of tactics are less clear. In some respects, conditions at Wukan were uniquely favourable to a strategy that incorporated appeals to the international media. First, the provincial leader of Guangdong, Wang Yang, is known for being one of China's more progressive leaders. Since assuming the leadership of the province in 2007, Wang has experimented with open government initiatives, encouraged union-based collective bargaining for factory workers, and has generally taken a more conciliatory approach to the province's frequent labour disputes.Footnote 79 In the case of Wukan, Wang openly acknowledged that the villagers’ demands were reasonable and played a central role in dictating an intervention from above. Wang directly ordered the deployment of a provincial working group that agreed to extend concessions to the villagers. Second, in late 2011, Wang was a candidate for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee, and during this sensitive period before his formal appointment, he had a strong personal interest in quickly and quietly resolving the protest, vindicating his approach to governance and strengthening his candidacy for higher office.Footnote 80 Finally, Wukan's relative proximity to Hong Kong may have played a role in raising the profile of the unrest in the village, alerting foreign journalists in the first place.Footnote 81 In the regions of China's hinterland, unrest might be less likely to draw international attention. In short, if a similar protest were to take place in a different context with a different individual controlling the levers of authority, the outcome might have not been the same.
On the other hand, the driving force behind the discontent in Wukan—undercompensated land seizures carried out by local cadres—is certainly not unique to the village in Guangdong. As illustrated in the empirical data of both Cai and Yu Jianrong (in China Daily), land rights issues have emerged as the leading cause of social unrest in China, motivating 65–67 per cent all major confrontations in recent years,Footnote 82 driving both rural disputes and a wave of urban ‘nail-house’-style protests against demolitions.Footnote 83 Consequently, the land rights issue is much larger than Wukan and, as suggested by Wang Yang himself, the ‘Wukan approach’ to conflict resolution might serve as model across Guangdong Province and the country as a whole, where the social ‘contradictions’ associated with land grabs have become a persistent cause of discontent.Footnote 84 Such concerns over unrest have reached the highest echelons of China's leadership, and Wang's approach is likely to have been closely examined by the Xi Jinping administration since it took office in 2012.Footnote 85
Moreover, aggrieved citizens resisting land seizures might also see inspiration in the Wukan incident. This possibility materialized when 1,000 villagers from Guangzhou's Baiyun district organized a protest at city government offices demanding they receive compensation for land seized from them by local cadres. One protestor who was quoted specifically referred to Wukan, ‘If our problems are not solved, Wanggang will become Guangdong's second Wukan.’Footnote 86 Copycat protests took place in areas as diverse as Zhejiang's Panhe VillageFootnote 87 and the Xishuangbanna region of Yunnan.Footnote 88
Protestors at these venues also assumed the risks associated with making appeals to the international media as these cases also reveal the serious personal risks associated with reaching out to foreign media to broadcast one's grievances on the international stage. At Panhe, the perils and possibilities around contacting foreign journalists became clear. In February, Remko Tanis, a correspondent for the Netherlands Press Association, slipped past a police cordon surrounding the village. He met with protest organizers and conducted a number of interviews with residents. Once news broke that a foreign journalist was in the village, residents from nearby areas arrived and began presenting him with documentation of illegal land seizures in their own communities. Villagers soon informed Tanis that local authorities were about to arrive and soon thereafter, 100 policemen broke into the building. The security officers attacked Tanis and the villagers present, and two officials then seized Tanis. As they left the town, ten unknown men stopped the car, pulled Tanis from the vehicle, seized his bag of documents, and violently attacked him. After Tanis was taken to Wenzhou, his bag was returned but with all the documents removed.Footnote 89 The next day, a French reporter Baptiste Fallevoz and his Chinese fixer Jack Zhang were spotted by a group of men waiting alongside one of the roads leading into the village. Soon thereafter 20–30 men stopped the car, pulled out Fallevoz and Zhang, and smashed their camera equipment. As they began beating Zhang, a uniformed policeman arrived and took the journalist and his now-bleeding Chinese fixer to the local security department.Footnote 90 The two separate incidents in Panhe were reported in the New York Times, the BBC, and other major international media outlets and condemned by international media watchdogs such as Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists.Footnote 91
The case of Panhe has helped highlight the potential dangers of involving foreign journalists in local protests. Such a tactic is potentially effective in raising the national profile of a local injustice and bringing greater pressure to bear on higher level cadres to conduct an intervention from above on behalf of aggrieved citizens. However, it remains to be seen how frequently organizers of China's tens of thousands of annual protest actions might attempt to bring their cause to international attention. Involving foreign journalists in a local dispute immediately raises the stakes of the conflict, as local cadres may use violence against the journalists or, more likely, their Chinese associates and the citizens who assist them. Moreover, the ability of foreign correspondents to reach and report on localized protests may also prove challenging. State restrictions on foreign journalists have continued, and even expanded, in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, as highlighted by the increasing difficulty and waiting period involved in securing a visa for registered foreign correspondents and repeated incidents of local officials blocking or harassing foreign journalists, including the assaults in Panhe and the recent dismissal of Al Jazeera English reporter, Melissa Chan—the first such expulsion of a foreign journalist from China since 1998.Footnote 92
Of course, when brutality is used directly against foreigners or their Chinese counterparts, it raises new risks for the local officials who carry out such actions. Attacks on foreign reporters or their associates causes international alarm and harms China's international reputation. These efforts can also backfire, actually raising rather than lowering the profile of a protest action. Attacks on foreign journalists may themselves become the more compelling news story, actually outpacing the local protests they were seeking to cover in the first place. This is particularly likely at a time when advanced communications technologies have diffused across the social spectrum of Chinese society, and the sight of internet-savvy, mobile phone-wielding working class citizens has become more and more common. In a Chinese society that now has one billion mobile phone users, 500 million internet users, and 200 million microbloggers, outright censorship has become increasingly problematic, and abuses against foreign journalists, Chinese microbloggers, and the protestors they seek to cover are often captured on mobile phone videos and cameras.Footnote 93
The Chinese Communist Party's efforts at media control have also grown more sophisticated in step with these developments. Recent works, such as Morozov's The Net Delusion have categorized the many, often-successful, efforts of China and other autocracies to use presumably liberating technology to enhance their control over the citizenry and grip on political power.Footnote 94 However, as highlighted in the case of Wukan, once aggrieved citizens have made the decision to broadcast their issue internationally and appeal to the foreign media, it places local officials in an awkward position, where a lose-lose decision must be made. They may either allow the coverage to take place or use coercion to prevent the foreign media from reaching the protest actors. Because the latter option can be recorded more readily in a Chinese society that in the digital age has more and more virtual eyes and ears than ever before, both options can result in raising the profile of an otherwise isolated protest action. In China's multilayered political structure, this could mean more ‘Wukans’ in the general sense that local protestors may broadcast their message internationally to raise public awareness of local injustices and ultimately place pressure on higher ranking officials to intervene on their behalf. While protest in China is likely to remain in its current fragmented, localized form—and we should certainly not raise alarms about the Chinese Communist Party's impeding collapse—Wukan's legacy might be that future protests may be pulled into a more global discourse and involve more international actors and audiences, raising the profile of many incidents that otherwise would have been resolved—for better or worse—in relative isolation within local communities.
