China builds careful cover-up of deadly fishing village siege

China builds careful cover-up of deadly fishing village siege

By Howard W. French
New York Times News Service
Published December 18, 2005

SHANGHAI, China -- Earlier this month, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly faceoff, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.

Today, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."

Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing seems certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent eyewitness accounts of what happened from emerging.

Residents of Dongzhou, a small town now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols, said in scores of interviews on the telephone and with visitors that they had endured beatings, bribes and threats at the hand of security forces since their protest over the construction of a power plant was violently put down.

Others said the corpses of the dead had been withheld, ostensibly because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government's version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones -- many of whom were shot during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude bombs were thrown by the villagers -- they should say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

"Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing," said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. "If the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan [$6,193], and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it."

The bomb story was also being repeated at a hospital in the nearby city of Shanwei. Plainclothes police surrounded a Chinese man who entered the hospital seeking to see the wounded, denying him access to a tightly guarded ward even when he said his relative was among the injured. Later, hospital staff told the man that the injured had all been warned to repeat the same story, of being injured by their own explosives.

The attempt to enforce a concocted story may help explain why residents have reported difficulty recovering the bodies.

The official Xinhua news agency said Saturday that only three people had been killed and eight others injured when security forces shot at protesters, so the existence of more bodies with gunshot wounds could destroy the official version of events and provide proof of overwhelming force against a lightly armed crowd.

"The relatives went in tears to the county offices to search for the dead and missing and they were beaten by electric truncheon, wounded and dispersed," a relative of Wei Jin, a man killed in the demonstration, said in an account of an attempted bribe involving his relative's corpse.

"They offered 50,000 yuan and told us we could only get back the body at night and bury it on the mountain immediately, without any mourning ceremony or fireworks, without anyone knowing about this," the man said. "And if someone from outside asks about the issue, we must say he died by his own bomb. We turned down the offer, and they doubled the money, but we still would not accept it."

The man said his relative had been shot twice, once from afar and again from close range.

Other residents of Dongzhou buried their relatives in secret so that the government would not take the body.

"We buried the body on the 7th by ourselves, and would not let them know where it is," said a relative of Lin Yidui, who was one of the dead. "You should let the dead lie in peace."

The Chinese government has said little about the violence in Dongzhou. After publishing its report in Xinhua, which saw very limited circulation in the country, the government also announced the arrest of an unnamed commander the next day, saying he had mishandled the incident and caused "mistaken deaths and accidental injuries."