Villagers Fight for Their Land Seized Seven Years Ago

Police officers in Henan responded to the villager’s protests against the illegal repurposing of their land without proper compensation by assaulting and arresting them. The victims included a disabled woman.

Bitter Winter has been reporting from the villages of China, where authorities seized land illegally and used it to make high profits. In the process, the police officers use violence to suppress the protesting villagers. In Fujian, for instance, the government even hired thugs last year to help with one such expropriation. In other cases, villagers were arrested and even ended up losing their lives.

Something similar transpired in a village of Henan’s Xuchang city on September 13. The municipal authorities dispatched over 120 personnel, including special and public security police, along with an excavator and two bulldozers, to commence the construction on the homestead land that the government seized illegally in 2011.

Video 1: Police officers guard the construction site (video from WeChat).

Since this land belonged to the villagers and they hadn’t been compensated for their loss, they gathered to protest against the construction.

The deputy director of the local police station ordered the villagers to disperse, threatening that if they didn’t do so, they would be arrested for “gathering a crowd and making a disturbance.”

Video 2: The police station’s deputy director orders villagers to disperse (video from WeChat).

While the villagers did not relent, the officials ordered the workers to carry on with their work. When a woman stepped forward in front of a bulldozer, she was pulled away, and a police officer doused pepper spray in her eyes.

A disabled resident walked at the spot where her home had stood years ago and smashed a rock on her head as a means of protest, but four police officers forcibly took her away from the site.

That day, the police arrested eight villagers. When the wife of one of them pleaded to let her husband go, an officer grabbed her arms and slammed her onto the ground, which caused her a heart attack. She had to be taken to a hospital for emergency medical treatment. Five of the arrested were detained illegally for nine days.

Video 3: Police officers arrest villagers (video from WeChat).

Despite such strong protests by the villagers, the authorities continued to carry on their construction work while denying the rightful compensation. One of the villagers who lost his land commented, “The government is bullying common people. We have nowhere to voice our complaints or redress the injustices.”

Reported by Jiang Tao