HOW MANY TROOPS WOULD IT TAKE TO REPRESS THE ENTIRE COUNTRYSIDE?:

Protesters in China Said to Be Killed: Police allegedly open fire on farmers seeking compensation for seized land and cordon off the village. State media and government are silent. (Mark Magnier, December 10, 2005, LA Times)

Heavily armed riot police tightened their grip on a village in southern Guangdong province today after fatally shooting residents earlier in the week who were protesting a power project, villagers and human rights groups said. [...]

Residents said they were told by power plant managers that a substantial sum had been paid to local officials to distribute to farmers losing land, but that it was never passed on to them. Work on the $743-million project started a year ago. The two units are scheduled for completion by 2007.

"Without land, we have no income," said Jiang, a tomato farmer with three children. "Thousands of police are all around our village. The kids' school has been shut and our family is holed up in the house."

"The brother of my friend was shot dead," said Cai, an 18-year-old resident, in a telephone interview. "He was 21. His parents, brother and sister knelt crying in front of police. They've been crying for days."

Some villagers said they hoped the central government would act against local corrupt officials.

"The police have total authority, they can surround villages or do whatever they want to isolate people," said Wu Guoguang, a professor at Canada's University of Victoria and a pro-reform government aide prior to the Tiananmen massacre. "Why would they do something so radical as to kill people?"

Human rights activists called for an independent investigation and said the incident underscored the need for reform of China's property rules, a source of enormous local frustration.

Technically, all property still belongs to the state. Corrupt officials often exploit this to seize land that farmers have tilled for generations, then turn around and sell it to developers.

"Courts are not the answer because there's no real law for property," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "It's a recipe for major problems."

Residents said the police who opened fired Tuesday appeared to be from the area, but reinforcements sent later were outsiders equipped with armor, shields and machine guns. Experts said it was unclear whether local police had panicked and exceeded their authority, or whether there had been a policy shift by the central government.