Western Journalists Attacked in Chinese Village Amid Unrest

A group of men attacked a Western journalist on Wednesday as he reported from the Chinese village of Panhe, where anger over land swaps erupted into protests this month and ignited comparisons to last year’s rebellion in the town of Wukan, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said on Thursday.

The journalists’ association said in an internal statement sent to its members, but published on the Shanghaiist blog, that “a group of thugs and men who appeared to be plainclothes policemen” had attacked and “beaten up” a Dutch journalist from the Netherlands Press Association, Remko Tanis, on Wednesday morning.

He had succeeded in entering the village early in the morning, when the police officers who have guarded its access roads were still asleep, the statement said:

At around 9h45 a group of around 100 policemen and thugs smashed violently into the room where Tanis was conducting interviews and started to beat the villagers and the reporter. During the tumult, the correspondent was grabbed by two people from the local Foreign Affairs Office who pushed him into a car. He asked for his bag, which had been taken by the policemen/thugs, and got it back.

He was driven towards the town of Longang, from where he had left in the morning. On the way, the car encountered a group of about 10 thugs who stopped it. These men pulled everyone, including the officials, out of the car, beat Tanis again and took his bag.

With a bit of understatement, Mr. Tanis was quoted by the association as saying afterward that “getting in touch with the people in Panhe is risky.” Foreign correspondents were cautioned to be “especially alert” when reporting on unrest in the town, which began in early February.

With comparisons to Wukan reportedly sprouting up on China’s social media sites, Global Times, the nation’s state-run English-language newspaper, published on Thursday a terse summary of events in the town.

The state news media report appeared calibrated to minimize the scale and importance of unrest there, saying roughly 200 protesters had marched and their grievances were being heard.

The report, while acknowledging clashes between security forces and protesters, appeared to indicate that the protests had ended. “The police removed the blockade and put up a notice saying that the government will pay all medical treatment fees for villagers hurt in the protests, local villagers said,” according to the report.

The protests in Panhe, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, have emerged under similar circumstances to those in Wukan, where villagers forced out the local Communist Party officials and took over the town briefly during an open rebellion in December. In both cases, land seizures by the government, a common practice in China, incited protests after an apparent failure in negotiations over compensation between local officials and a group of village representatives.

“Officials from the village sold land; this land originally belonged to the villagers,” a person in Panhe told the Chinese-language broadcaster NTD television, which is based in New York and highly critical of the Chinese government. Another told the broadcaster last week that most of the village had turned out to protest: “I have even seen kids coming out, passing by my building.”

The broadcast included footage said to be from the town this month:

Shanghaiist also reported a second beating of reporters in the town in recent days. Two journalists from France 24, a reporter, Baptiste Fallevoz, and his Chinese fixer, Jack Zhang, told the blog that they had been attacked by a mob in the town after their car was rammed:

About 20 to 30 plainclothes thugs then surrounded their car and pulled Zhang out, trying to grab his video camera from him (he was not filming at the time). When they got the camera, they threw it on the ground and smashed it in front of him. They then continued to attempt to attack Zhang, hitting him on the head with the camera until he started bleeding.

Mr. Fallevoz was not harmed, and afterward the police said that villagers had attacked them because of an unspecified local rivalry, Shanghaiist reported, adding that the pair were compensated 45,000 renminbi, or about $7,100, for injury and damage to their equipment. It was not immediately clear who paid that sum to the journalists.

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Glimpses of a Chinese Town Under Lockdown

The GuardianA still image from a Guardian video filmed inside the town of Aba, which is under lockdown by Chinese security forces after a string of self-immolations by protesters.

In the latest of a string of self-immolation protests against Chinese policies, a 19-year-old Tibetan monk set himself on fire on Monday in the rugged western Chinese town of Aba, the advocacy group Free Tibet said in an e-mailed statement. It was the 23rd self-immolation by a Tibetan since last March and the second by a teenager in three days, according to the group.

Chinese security forces standing nearby quickly doused the flames before hauling the monk, Lobsang Gyatso, away from the scene, the group said. Neither the severity of his burns nor his current whereabouts were immediately known.

His protest followed that of an 18-year-old nun, Tenzin Choedon, who died on Saturday after lighting herself on fire.

The town of Aba, or Ngaba in Tibetan, and the wider area of the northwestern Sichuan province where it is located have been locked down for months by Chinese security forces who have thrown up a series of checkpoints along the roads leading into the area and prevented nearly all foreign journalists from entering, The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts reported. The authorities have also blocked Internet and mobile phone communications, preventing the type of activist and citizen journalist reports that have allowed information to escape to other restive areas around the world.

Despite the lockdown, some reporters managed to get inside the area to document the heavy security presence, especially on the streets of Aba, where many of the self-immolations by monks from the Kirti monastery have taken place. The first of the recent wave of self-immolations occurred in the town during the spring of 2009 to protest China’s repression of Tibetan culture and religion.

Mr. Watts from The Guardian was the latest to sneak inside, posting furtive video filmed from a moving car of the dense concentrations of security forces and barricades in the city. The video also captured fire trucks as well as security officers carrying fire extinguishers or batons. Mr. Watts reports that “the authorities are trying to extinguish dissent with fire trucks and riot police.”

According to his report:

Aba has road blocks, spot checks and a security presence reminiscent of conflict zones in the Middle East or Northern Ireland.

But the violence here is, for the most part, self-inflicted. And the battle is not for territory, but for hearts and minds and beliefs.

Last October, a reporter from Agence France-Presse filmed similar scenes in Aba out the window of a moving car. That video included scenes of security officers in fatigues and riot gear patrolling in the streets as if the city were under occupation. The patrols also include officers carrying fire extinguishers.

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