Dongzhou, Dongzhou, Dongzhou
This just in:
Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 10 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday....
During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.
Police started firing into the crowd, killing as many as 10 people, mostly men, and wounding up to 20, villagers reached by telephone said Friday....
State media have not mentioned 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.
The number of protests in China's vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over land seizures, corruption 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....
A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village Friday and called the shootings "a misunderstanding."
Note to Tookie's lawyers - here's another defense you can use.
If the mentally incapacitated defense doesn't work,
if the genius defense doesn't work,
if the innocence defense doesn't work,
if the redeemed defense doesn't work,
try the "it's just a misunderstanding" defense. What have you got to lose?
"He said he hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said by 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," the woman said, sobbing. "Most of the police are armed. We dare not 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," she 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 Friday. "I'm afraid of dying. People have already died."...
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