Inside the Pitchfork Rebellion

By Hannah Beech/ Panlong

The man is almost too scared to talk. "I am just a farmer," he whispers, shortly after the police had descended on his village of Panlong in China's southern Guangdong province. "I know I don't matter." But what he has witnessed does. In mid-January, the man joined a remarkable protest against the local government's decision to seize communal farmland and lease it to a foreign investor. For several days, more than 1,000 villagers gathered near the disputed land, brandishing pitchforks and blocking a highway. But the brief exercise in free expression ended in tragedy. As dusk fell on Jan. 14, men armed with electric batons poured out of police vans and attacked the farmers. Villagers say a 13-year-old girl who tried to hide behind a woodpile was beaten to death, and they estimate that 20 or so others were seriously injured. (A spokesperson from nearby Zhongshan City claims the girl died of a heart attack.) The clash was barely reported within China, but few locals believe it will be the last. Says the witness, who doesn't want his name used for fear of official retribution: "The local government has lost the hearts of the people."

China's leaders had better try to win them back. Violent local protests are convulsing the Chinese countryside with ever greater frequency--and Beijing has proved unable to quell the unrest. By the central government's own count, there were 87,000 "public-order disturbances" in 2005, up from 10,000 in 1994. Most took place in out-of-the-way hamlets like Panlong, where peasants who were once the backbone of the Communist Party feel excluded from China's full-throttle economic development. Many of China's 900 million rural inhabitants are farmers, who have little legal or political leverage. They have borne a disproportionate share of the side effects of China's growth, from environmental degradation to misrule by local party officials more eager to line their pockets than provide basic services. Income disparity between the urban rich and the rural poor is at its widest since the People's Republic was founded in 1949. "What China has now is the worst of a planned economy and the worst of capitalism," says Christine Wong, a University of Washington professor who studies local governance in China. "The farmers are the ones who are losing out the most."

Their anger could have seismic consequences. Revolutions in China have a history of springing from rural discontent. The Communist Party rose to power on the strength of its pledge to protect the rights of farmers who joined its fight to overthrow the landlord class. The current crop of Communist leaders is aware that rural unrest could spark political mayhem, especially when cell phones and the Internet can connect citizens with the click of a button. In some cases, such as in Panlong, local officials have resorted to violence to suppress the uprisings, which has only incited more rage. In response to the rising furor, President Hu Jintao announced plans last month to give billions of dollars in central-government aid to farmers. "If farmers are rich, then the country will be prosperous," Hu said. "If villages are stable, then the society will also be stable."

But promises from Beijing alone won't stem the discontent. Today, China is one of the only countries that puts the responsibility for health care, social security and education in local governments' hands, but the focus on generating foreign investment rather than supplying basic services has left much of rural China, where 70% of the population lives, in a dire condition. Millions live on the edge of destitution, without access to sustainable jobs or medical care. Although Beijing regularly pumps out well-meaning initiatives, most are unfunded mandates that are ignored by local officials. "We talk to the central government, and it's clear they want to reverse these huge inequalities," says the University of Washington's Wong, who also works for the World Bank as a consultant on China. "But fixing the problem is like pushing a piece of string through five levels of government. I think many people in Beijing have come to the conclusion that they don't know how to fix this problem."

To get a sense of why social conditions in the countryside have given rise to popular unrest, it is instructive to look closely at Panlong, where farmland is losing ground to foreign-invested factories that employ migrants instead of local peasants. Three years ago, the village didn't exist. Instead there were two villages, one named Peace, the other Patriotism. But in 2003 leaders from Peace and Patriotism decided to merge their farmland and rent it to a Hong Kong company that wanted a large plot for a textile factory. The new village was renamed Panlong, or Coiled Dragon--a moniker more suitable for a rural hamlet with economic ambitions.

But Panlong disappointed its residents. Villagers say they were not consulted on the land deal, and many resented their farmland being taken away. Even worse, they were told by village leaders that compensation per mu--a local measurement equivalent to 1/15 of a hectare--would amount to about $100 a year, even though the factory was paying $3,300 per mu. Where the rest of the money was going wasn't clear, although villagers claim that soon after the land contract was signed, several village committee members started building homes or bought new cars. (A Panlong village committee spokesman declined to discuss details of the alleged buying spree, telling TIME, "I don't know anything about this situation.") Says a Panlong resident: "We all live in the same place, and we can see what they are doing," adding that his friends were hired to construct a new house for one of the local officials. "They can't keep secrets from us."

There isn't much farmers can do with such knowledge. China's legal framework leaves farmers without a proper channel to protest land grabs or local corruption. The country's judges are hired and fired by local authorities, complicating efforts to instill judicial independence. "A lot of local officials do outrageous things, and the people they govern can't do very much about it," says Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University. "The courts are not working. They're often allied with the government and refuse to take cases."

In the case of Panlong, villagers say they twice sent representatives to Beijing hoping someone would listen to their land-dispute issue, but no one did. In January, after months of fruitless petitioning of various levels of government, Panlong residents decided to stage a protest near their seized land. A similar effort in nearby Dongzhou village a month before had ended with paramilitary police killing at least six locals. But people in Panlong felt they had no other choice. The protest stayed peaceful for several days, until armed men with electric truncheons descended on the crowd and started beating everyone from young teenagers to elderly women, according to eyewitnesses. "I can't bear thinking about what I saw," says a protest participant, whose friend was hospitalized after being beaten in the head.

The Panlong saga isn't an isolated case. In the village of Liujiaying, in eastern Shandong province, local officials told residents in 2003 that they would lose their fruit and vegetable fields. After finding out how little compensation the village committee was offering, Liujiaying villagers refused to clear their land. Within a few months, the fields were bulldozed in the middle of the night, destroying decades-old grapevines and fruit trees. Later, rows of greenhouses were torn down. Peasants who complained say they were awakened at night by bricks crashing through their windows, and that several villagers were beaten up. ("I don't know the details of this case," says a spokesman for the municipal government of Qingdao, the nearby administrative capital that oversees the village. "There are too many incidents like this in China.")

As in Panlong, authorities in Liujiaying have used brute force to silence those with the temerity to speak out. In January, Liu Yinde, 62, traveled to Qingdao to seek redress, bearing a petition letter that detailed the alleged abuses. In it, he claimed $1.8 million in lost farming income for the village and appealed directly to Beijing: "We farmers believe the central government headed by President Hu will carry out the law for the people. We believe you certainly will take care of our village affairs." But before he was able to submit his letter, Liu says, a group of hooligans stopped him at the train station, tore up the letter and kept him hostage for eight days in a hotel. "I can't understand why no one addresses my problems," Liu says. "What good is the law if it doesn't serve the people?"

Peasants might not be so upset if cash from confiscated fields were used to build new schools or clean water projects. Instead, they complain, the money is often diverted by local officials. And few corruption investigations lead to sentencing, not least because officials tend to protect their own. Farmers who once trusted the central government's ability to fix problems find their faith in the system dimming and their anger rising. "They had been told that reform was coming, so they were patient," says Philip Brown, an economist who studies rural China and teaches at Colby College. "But now they see that the reforms don't go far enough, and they think, This is what we've been waiting for?" The official Chinese media, which has tried to educate farmers on their basic rights, only heightens that disenchantment. "The media can't report on the bad things that happen to you, and so it overreports on the good things," says Mary Gallagher, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "And that causes unrealistic expectations."

The question is whether Beijing can assuage rural discontent before it hardens into a wider, more flammable agrarian revolt. The central government has experimented with programs that channel money more directly to the people meant to receive it--one project involves wiring teachers' salaries to post-office accounts instead of leaving pay at the discretion of local officials. But the authorities' main tactic for stopping the spread of rural protests remains preventing word about them from getting out. Panlong residents say that since the Jan. 14 protest, their uncensored satellite feed from Hong Kong has been cut, so they have little idea how the outside world views their story. Journalists who try to get close to the village have been detained.

But China may not be able to stifle the voices of protest much longer. About 30 miles from Panlong, in the village of Lishan, a farmer named Liang Beidai is one of the growing number who are ready to fight back. Three Lishan residents were injured last month after protests of land seizures turned bloody, with a high school student allegedly shot in the head. "We are prepared to die for [our rights]," says protest leader Liang. "The entire village is doomed anyway. We have no money, no job, no land. There's nothing left to be scared of." If angry farmers truly lose their sense of fear, it may ultimately be Beijing that is running scared.

With reporting by Bu Hua/ Shanghai, Susan Jakes/ Beijing