Chinese Farmers Rampage Over Taxes
B E I J I N G, Aug. 31 -- Peace has reportedly returned to an area near the cradle of China’s Communist revolution, after thousands of farmers there joined in one of China’s biggest civil disturbances in recent years.
Armed paramilitary police were dispatched to China’s Jiangxi province earlier this month, local officials say, after rampaging farmers smashed government offices and looted homes of the rich.
The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a Hong Kong-based human rights group, said more than 20,000 peasants had staged violent protests against harsh taxes.
One rice farmer in Yuandu, a town of about 100,000 where some rioting took place, told ABCNEWS: “The farmers were so angry that they threw stones at the government office and ransacked it. The glass windows were all broken and the office itself is very much damaged.”
The farmer didn’t reveal his real name because he was afraid of retaliation from the local authorities.
“Armed police units came to reinforce the local public security forces. They told us to return to our villages or else face arrest,” he said.
No deaths or injuries were reported, but scores of peasants were arrested and it took five days to bring the rioting and looting under control, reports said.
The farmer heard from others that most, if not all, of those arrested were recently released.
Ironic Epicenter
Ironically, the area around Fengcheng city, where the riot occurred, is in the mountainous territory where Chairman Mao Zedong and the Communist Red Army set up the first “revolutionary base” in the 1920s, drawing on support from downtrodden peasants.
The Yuandu farmer said things turned violent when local authorities began harassing farmers who wanted to distribute a pamphlet explaining how the central government wanted to reduce the tax burden of the farmers.
“The pamphlet even had Premier Zhu Rongji’s face on its cover and contained Beijing’s instructions on reducing our taxes, but the local officials didn’t want us to circulate these copies,” he said.
