Intimidation backfires in Wukan poll
After long discussions with her family, Xue Jianwan had decided not to stand as a candidate for the Wukan village election that took place at the weekend. Then she received a call from local government officials asking her to report to the primary school where she teaches for a meeting with the headteacher.
That meeting changed her mind, and made her determined to seek one of the seven seats on the committee which will control decisions over areas such as land sales – the issue that sparked the original protest in the village in China's southern province of Guangdong, last September.
Ms Xue, 22, has a greater reason than most for wanting to influence the changes under way in the village – seen by some as an example of how democratic change could happen in China. She is the eldest child of Xue Jinbo, the popular village activist whose death in police custody in December prompted thousands of villagers to protest for 11 days in Wukan.
The village, which has also elected an election committee and ombudsman's authority to monitor its leaders in the past four weeks, has become a sliver of hope for democracy in China. Guangdong province's top official, Wang Yang, hopes it will be a successful experiment of using free elections to reduce the anger felt by farmers faced with land-grabbing by party officials.
But at the meeting with the school principal and officials, Ms Xue was told that she should either not run or resign from her job because public servants were prohibited from serving on village committees. "They told me, 'As a woman, you need a stable life,'" Ms Xue recalls.
The government's threats and inducements – officials offered to make her principal of a kindergarten – had the opposite effect and made her more determined to run.
"I thought that if they don't want me to, I must join the race," Ms Xue says, seated in her family's small living room. "If the local government is so much against it, it must be good for the village."
She sounds surprised by her own determination. "I went along with other people's opinions," she said. "Now my family says to me, 'Why are you so unafraid?' I have adopted the character of my father."
While none of the other 22 candidates for the seven-seat committee were similarly intimidated – in part because none of them is employed by the government – the local officials' desire to exclude Ms Xue from the election is an illustration of how other authorities might react when their personal fiefdoms are challenged.
An hour after the Financial Times interviewed her on Friday, Ms Xue was locked into her home by two of her uncles who, according to several villagers, were acting at the behest of local government officials.
Ms Xue and her family have been criticised for recently accepting more than $500,000 from the local government as compensation for his death. The family initially refused the money, but then took it as part of a settlement, Ms Xue said, to secure the release of her father's body. A large shrine erected by the villagers, complete with an offering of Budweiser beer, was only removed after his funeral last month.
Late on Saturday night, Ms Xue finally withdrew from an election run-off, made necessary as some of the candidates did not reach the 50 per cent mark in the first round of voting. She gave her backing instead to a charismatic protest leader, Hong Ruichao, 25, who was duly elected in the run-off as a deputy to Lin Zuluan, 68, after he won the contest to be village chief.
Ms Xue admits her decision to withdraw from the contest was also influenced by her mother and grandmother's desire that she stand down. Two other twenty-something year old leaders who, like Mr Hong, were also detained by the police in December were elected to the village committee.
When Ms Xue voted on Saturday morning she was confronted by a thicket of cameras held by the foreign media – local press were not allowed to cover the poll. With her teenaged brother and a couple of young friends trying to protect her from a near stampede of reporters, she said: "Every vote we give here today is a vote to represent my father."
In her matter-of-fact way, Ms Xue was explaining the local government's opposition to her candidacy. If she had been elected, the village's veneration of Xue Jinbo would have been prolonged.