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Chinese protests at official coverup of teen's death
Thousands of rioters torched police cars and government office buildings in the south-western province of Guizhou after allegations that local officials covered up a teenage girl's death.It started with the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. The story that flashed around Weng'an county was that three men were responsible, two of them with great "guangxi", or local connections. One of them was reportedly the son of the deputy mayor. When the police report said she had killed herself, tensions really began to simmer. When her popular schoolteacher uncle went to the police to seek justice, he was beaten into a coma and subsequently died. The tensions turned into rioting. Lacking formal means to vent their anger, the people of Weng'an turned the town upside down, and the YouTube website carried shocking pictures of burning police cars and local government offices. The scenes of mayhem and anarchy are the ones the Communist Party fears most as it is always worried that dissent could spread nationwide. Corruption at local level is something the Chinese government has vowed to wipe out, and last week it introduced a five-year plan to combat it. Eyewitnesses reported one death and many injuries in the riots. At around 4am yesterday morning, police used megaphones to urge people to leave the area, and local television stations broadcast notices asking people who participated in the protest to turn themselves in. The riots even made it on to the official Xinhua news agency, which ran a brief story and blamed the riots on unhappiness about the official ruling over the girl's death. Posted by: lotp 2008-06-30 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=242964 |