About 1,000 villagers in southern China overturned police vehicles in weekend protests after local authorities refused to bear the funeral costs for a 106-year-old woman as required by law, witnesses said.
Local government officials of Haifeng county in Guangdong province initially buried the woman but demanded that her son foot the bill for the burial plot and funeral expenses, contrary to rules which dictate that the authorities pay all funeral expenses for those over 100 years old.
When the son said he could not afford to bear the costs, local officials threatened to unearth his mother from the grave, sparking anger among villagers who staged mass protests on Saturday against what they called “abuse of power.”
“The village asked her children to pay for the burial land and the funeral. But the village rule is that a family should only pay if the deceased person is under 100 years old,” a villager surnamed Zeng told RFA’s Mandarin service on Monday.
Zeng said dozens of police officers were dispatched to suppress the protests, but the villagers confronted them upon their arrival.
“On the way to the village, many protesters joined hands to stop the police. [The police] came in about 30 cruisers, but 11 were smashed,” he said. Several vehicles had been overturned by the angry mob.
Zeng said that several villagers were injured in the clash, but that none of those who took part in the protest had been arrested by police.
Photos posted online showed police officers in riot gear at the scene.
Another villager, also surnamed Zeng, said the protesters were mostly young men.
“There were about 1,000 people there, and most of them were in their late teens,” he said.
“There was no such rule before—requiring payment for burying [an elderly] person.”
Land dispute
Zeng said that the dispute over the burial costs was just the latest in ongoing conflicts with the local government.
He said that officials had also subcontracted village land to outside developers without compensating residents.
“The discontent has been simmering for a long time because land had been subcontracted to businessmen from [neighboring] Zhejiang province to operate a shrimp farm pond,” Zeng said.
“Now we can neither fish nor farm. The people used this opportunity to vent their anger,” he said.
Phone calls to the township office and the local police station were answered by employees, but they declined to comment on either the allegations about the burial row or the land dispute.
In China, all land is ultimately owned by the state, but is allocated to rural communities under collective contract and through the household responsibility system that replaced the state-run farms and communes of the Mao era.
Land acquisition for development, often resulting in lucrative property deals for local officials, has led to thousands of protests by local communities across China every month, many of which escalate into clashes with police.
Original reporting by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Ping Chen.