Chinese police shoot wind farm protestors

Hundreds of riot police armed with guns and shields surrounded and sealed off a southern Chinese village where authorities shot dead as many as 20 demonstrators this week, villagers said.

Residents in Dongzhou, a village in Guangdong province, said thousands of people had gathered on Tuesday to protest what they said was inadequate compensation being offered for land to be used in the construction of a wind power plant.

Police fired into the crowd and killed a handful of people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said yesterday. Accounts of the death toll ranged from two and 10, with many missing.

State media have made no mention of the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.

All the villagers said they were nervous and scared and most did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. One man said the situation was still “tumultuous”.

A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village yesterday and called the shootings “a misunderstanding”.

“He said (he) hoped it wouldn’t become a big issue,” the girl said over the telephone. “This is not a misunderstanding. I am afraid. I haven’t been to school in days.”

She added, “Come save us.”

Another villager said there were at least 10 deaths.

“The riot police are gathered outside our village. We’ve been surrounded,” she said, sobbing. “Most of the police are armed. We dare not to go out of our home.”

“We are not allowed to buy food outside the village. They asked the nearby villagers not to sell us goods,” the woman said. “The government did not give us proper compensation for using our land to build the development zone and plants. Now they come and shoot us. I don’t know what to say.”

One woman said an additional 20 people were wounded.

“They gathered because their land was taken away and they were not given compensation,” she said. “The police thought they wanted to make trouble and started shooting.”

She said there were “several hundred” police with guns in the roads outside the village yesterday. “I'm afraid of dying. People have already died.”

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper today quoted villagers who said authorities were trying to conceal the deaths by offering families money to give up bodies of the dead.

“They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body,” an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. “We are not going to agree.”

Police were carrying photos of villagers and trying to find people linked to the protest, the newspaper said, citing villagers.

The number of protests in China’s vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over corruption, land seizures and a yawning wealth gap that experts say now threatens social stability. The government says about 70,000 such conflicts occurred last year, although many more are believed to go unreported.

Clashes have grown more violent, with injuries on both sides and damage done to property as protesters vent their frustration in face of indifferent or bullying authorities.

Like many cities in China, Shanwei, the city where Dongzhou is located, has cleared suburban land once used for farming to build industrial zones. State media say that the Shanwei Red Bay industrial zone is to have three electrical power plants – a coal-fired plant, a wave power plant and a wind farm.

Shanwei already has a large wind farm on an offshore island, with 25 turbines. Another 24 are set for construction.

Earlier reports said the building of the 743-million-dollar coal-fired power plant, a major government-invested project for the province, was also disrupted by a dispute over land compensation.

Authorities in Dongzhou were trying to find the leaders of Tuesday’s demonstration, a villager said.

The man said the bodies of some of the shooting victims ”are just lying there”.

“Why did they shoot our villagers?” he asked. “They are crazy!”