Talk:Wukan protests

new article name may be needed
This is no longer a single "riot", it's a village rather than a city, and evicting the Communist Party of China officials from a village is a bigger event than "just rioting". IMHO we should give this a few days before thinking of a new name for the article. See WP:NAME for hints. Boud (talk) 19:39, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Agree on all counts. Maybe something like '[2011] Wukan standoff,' or the more ambiguous Wukan protest. If we wish to shift focus from the actions of villagers to the official response, we might consider 'Seige of Wukan' or 'Wukan blockage' (both terms having been used in a number of RS of late). Certainly, the overwhelming majority of news reporting focuses on Wukan, not Lufeng. The village itself is now noteworthy enough to merit its own page, as well. Homunculus (duihua) 21:24, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * My present guess is that 2011 Wukan uprising would tend to be the NPOV descriptive choice. The recent mainstream media RS seem to me to focus on "Wukan" rather than "Lufeng" - i agree here, though i haven't read much about the issue. Several RS call it a siege or a cordon or a blockade, but several also call it a revolt or a rebellion. The Arab Spring articles generally evolved to a consensus form of protests -> uprising -> revolution. The CCP has literally been thrown out, according to all the RS. It's only a village, but that doesn't change the event's nature as an uprising.


 * I doubt it can be called a "revolution" as yet. Those villagers are currently mostly against local government's corruption, instead of against the rule of Beijing's Central Government. There are photos showing the villagers waving banners calling out for Beijing's direct intervention, and wanting to go to Beijing to appeal to the Central Government to root out corruption in the local government. It doesn't look like a "revolution" yet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.73.137.207 (talk) 03:19, 21 December 2011 (UTC)


 * A problem with "2011 Wukan siege" is that the siege is only the most recent part of the whole sequence of related events. Splitting the article would seem a bit premature to me. Boud (talk) 22:53, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Would it be too cumbersome to refer to the 'Wukan uprising and blockade'? I'm just tossing out ideas here. I would also be fine with your suggestion of 2011 Wukan uprising. Homunculus (duihua) 00:11, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Wukan Uprising, Wukan Protests of Siege of Wukan would all be appropriate names. There is no need to append the "2011" if there are no other significant events in the town of a similar nature. Colipon+ (Talk) 01:02, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

restructure
i'm starting a restructure. First the lead:
 * First one-sentence paragraph with no details, just that stuff happened in Sep and Dec and things like the Wukan name, where it is.
 * Second paragraph with an NPOV summary of the September section. This paragraph probably needs to be shortened: what are the key factual points of the main section? what are their key refs?
 * Third paragraph with an NPOV summary of the December section - using refs that have already been used in the main content.
 * Fourth, one-sentence paragraph with media reactions/judgments of importance.

Here are some random bits that people might want to restore somewhere, but didn't seem right in the lead:
 * allegations of corruption
 * Although (WP:WEASEL word) there are more than 90,000 civil disturbances in China each year, the September riot was notable for occurring in a town that was declared a model of harmony.
 * A reference is needed for the harmonious village claim, and probably best first in the main content, not the lead. Boud (talk) 12:13, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * It is referenced at the first occurrence after the lead. Ref 12 of the current version. As you find it needing substantiation, better to move that ref into the lead. -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 13:49, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Also I think mentioning corruption and the land grab in the lead is more than justified – it's the root cause. -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 13:51, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * i tried to be careful by putting these bits here so that people (probably you?) didn't think that they were meant to be definitively removed - i didn't quite see their role, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be there.
 * i've tried to restore the "harmonious" issue to the lead. i didn't put "was notable" because then we would need to attribute it to which newspapers or notable people think it's notable. It's easier to state the fact - the claim of being harmonious - and readers can infer the contradiction if they wish.
 * land grab and corruption: the land grab is discussed clearly (3 different sentences refer to the land issue) in the 2nd paragraph of the lead (still needs repeat references). Corruption - i've wikilinked this in the main text. i don't quite see it as a big enough point (from the point of view of the main text of this article) to go in the lead. Boud (talk) 14:23, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Other bits that i have removed and people may wish to restore in some useful place: Boud (talk) 13:35, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * said to be the chief negotiator for the villagers,

latest development section integrated into the main text
It is true that this topic is related to a current event, but please have a look at the recommendations in WP:NEWS. This should read as an encyclopedia article. The chronologically latest "developments", if they are judged by reliable sources to be relevant, can be included in an appropriate part of the text - chronological sections normally start at the beginning and end at the end (most recent significant event), but the article as a whole is not just a chronological list of events.

I shifted the "latest development" section into what seemed to be the right place, essentially without modifying it much. Other Wikipedians might judge it to be either less or more important - but that will be easiest with the text in the right place. Boud (talk) 19:27, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Article title
I was initially indifferent about the move from Siege of Wukan to Wukan protests, but I tend to agree with Quigley's argument that the former name is rather narrow in that it accurately describes the 'second phase' of the protests, while the latter name more broadly encapsulates the overall dispute that started in September. I am noting that the zh.wp article is entitled '2011年陸豐烏坎事件' or '2011 Lufeng Wukan incident' – that name (use of the word "incident") is quite typical of similar articles in the Chinese language press. Before there is an edit war over the name, can we have some further discussion as to the merits of one over the other, please? -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 11:49, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The main 2011 protest articles have gone through a protests to uprising to revolution-or-civil-war descriptive name sequence. Tunisia and Egypt got to revolution as the main name, Libya to civil war a.k.a. revolution. Yemen, Bahrain and Syria have got to uprisings: 2011 Yemeni uprising, 2011 Bahraini uprising, 2011 Syrian uprising and not (yet) passed wikipedia consensus as revolutions (Yemen might by February). The Wukan case is stronger than Yemen, Syria and Bahrain - the previous village government and the police have been completely thrown out according to all our RS. The villagers want the national level Communist Party to help them, and we don't (yet) know much from RS about their self-administration, so IMHO "revolution" would not be justified by the sources - revolution seems to me to imply an intention to remain "independent". So Wukan uprising or 2011 Wukan uprising seems to me the most likely name to emerge as a stable result of wikiconsensus. It's broad enough to include from September to December: the earlier part on its own would be a bit weak for uprising, but it did force some political changes, and it counts more as "uprising" than as "siege". Boud (talk) 21:44, 18 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I am fine with Boud's suggestion of 'Wukan uprising.' As events unfold we may need to consider this further, but it seems to be a good solution for the time being.  I don't know why, but I have a real distaste for the euphemistic habit of naming major events "incidents," as though they were isolated or inconsequential mishaps.Homunculus (duihua) 21:37, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

reactions of international media (and possible role of international media in exaggerating/misleading the public)
In with the comment Hindu's redundant & historically ignorant assessment not worth note, the judgment of a mainstream newspaper of the world's largest democracy was removed. The international media section is WP:NPOV - the newspapers make the claims - en.Wikipedia does not claim that the newspapers are right. So i'm restoring the quote.

If there are RS's analysing Western and South Asian mainstream media's reactions to the events, then that could be used as another subsection. The role of at least US media in promoting US foreign policy interests is thoroughly documented as a general statistical property of the US media, and expected to be somewhat similar for other Western mainstream media - and presumably South Asian media too. But in the en.Wikipedia we don't have much alternative to using them - if external studies of their biases in particular cases have been made, then those studies can be used in individual articles as another part of the encyclopedic knowledge about the event. Boud (talk) 21:59, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Longtou protests
The Longtou 1000-person tearing down of fences around a land-grab was announced by New Tang Dynasty Television, as reported online by Phayul.com. Another report is by Radio Free Asia. All three have obvious biases, though only the third is a direct governmental mouthpiece AFAIK. That's why we have to be careful to NPOV this. Maybe they are exaggerating or deliberately confusing Longtou (or Longtoucun?) in Shanwei with one of the many, many other Longtou villages/towns in the PRC. However (weasel word, but this a discussion, not article content), Google maps put the three Longtoucun roads (south, middle, north) as being about 9 km to the east of Wukan. This is credible as being a "neighbouring" village.

If anyone has better or conflicting sources, please add them. For example, if someone has evidence (RS) that the claim is an outright lie - e.g. a long online Longtou newspaper that is independent of national and local governmental authorities, etc., then please add that too - that would help NPOV the section. There should be enough zh-readers around to check zh-language sources. Boud (talk) 21:29, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The RFA source - just half a sentence - http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/protester-12162011095739.html Boud (talk) 21:32, 19 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Neither New Tang Dynasty Television nor Phayul.com are considered "reliable sources", so they should not be used unless facts are corroborated by one that is. -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 05:50, 20 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but being overtly biased against the government of the PRC is not evidence of being unreliable:
 * New Tang Dynasty Television quotes: It was intended to offer an alternative to the Chinese government’s dominance in the Chinese media industry. ... devotes extensive news coverage to Chinese human rights issues, taking a critical stance on abuses of power by the Communist Party of China. ... The station's critical reporting on the Communist Party of China has prompted censorship and alleged interference with its reporting and business operations by the Chinese government. ... part of a media empire founded by and affiliated with Falun Gong practitioners.
 * Phayul.com quotes: a pro-Tibetan independence[1][2] website that publishes news and opinion about Tibet and Tibet-in-exile. Created in 2001 by Tibetan exiles in India,
 * Falun Gong and Tibet are two topics that the PRC government censors heavily - it's not up to the Wikipedia to support censorship of news sources that are biased in relation to those topics. i think that this is a reasonable corollary of WP:CENSOR: we do not decide that some sources are unreliable just because they are overtly opposed to a government.
 * The existence of Longtou village "neighbouring" Wukan was confirmed on searching map data, and Vmenkov pointed out that "cun" means village - which i wasn't aware of. This makes at least the existence of a small neighbouring village with the right name credible. For the moment i'm restoring the Longtou info, on the basis of WP:CENSOR. Boud (talk) 08:38, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * No sorry, censorship has nothing to do with it. It's not as if we're quoting anything that Li Hongzhi or the 14th Dalai Lama is saying, in which case it would be justified to have attributed quotes. If the information is indeed relevant and factual, it will appear in a reliable source eventually somewhere. Right now, we can't even be sure the protests are actually in a neighbouring village. --  Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 10:05, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You don't seem to provide any counterarguments to my concern about censorship. The PRC government in general wishes to censor these two sources. Please add RS'd info to New Tang Dynasty Television and Phayul.com if you think that there is evidence that they are not RS's. I cannot see any recent edits by you, and i cannot see that info on unreliability in the articles. Opposition to the government of the PRC is not unreliability in terms of WP:RS.
 * As for your second sentence, Phayul.com says a "neighbouring" village, RFA says a "nearby" village, and the name of the village referred to both by Phayul.com and RFA is consistent with Google maps info - see below. So my censorship concern remains. Boud (talk) 10:18, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * It seems that only these dissident sources are reporting that news for now, so are you now implying that the mainstream RS press are censoring information too? If so, what reason would they have for censoring? Our duty to our readers is to provide accurate and verifiable information. Anything else equally contentions is best left out until it can be attributed to a RS. Perhaps 'normal RS' are unable to confirm for now. Look what happened about Jiang Zemin's alleged death, or Jon Bon Jovi's ... they relied on a dissident website's information that subsequently proved to be inaccurate. Some people at HKATV got canned as a result. ;-) --  Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 13:42, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * As I said, NTDTV may be reliable for citing a comment from Li Hongzhi, but it is a SPS for this purpose and should be used quite sparingly. Falun Gong has declared total war against the CPC, and have been used to use the same style of propaganda as the CPC controlled media; it is not averse to exaggerating magnitude of protests to foment it.  So far, we have this article that reports (like RFA) a sympathy demonstration in Longtou, without mentioning the smashing of fences and without quantifying the numbers. I would have no issue to including that fact, if we leave out the extra details until they are confirmed through reliable sources. --  Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 16:33, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * i don't see how NTDTV counts as a WP:SPS - SPS is about a single person publishing something with essentially no editorial layers of other people checking/criticising/correcting/applying known systematic media filters. NTDTV is clearly too big to be run just by one person. IMHO we're running around in circles here: different RS have different biases, and some are more subtle than others. "Declaring total war" by Falun Gong just means that it's less subtle than US corporate interests and the way that their interests are represented by the US mainstream media. As per WP:BIAS, different Wikipedians tend to consider different sources to be more or less reputable or more or less biased, even though bias is not supposed to be a criterion in judging RS's. NPOV comes from a mix of biases. Anyway, the Asia News article says very little (literally, it does quantify the number in the Longtou rally - 7000 - but since it's a "woman from Wukan" who reports about "yesterday's rally" 2 paragraphs below the mention of "a rally yesterday", it does suggest that the author is not sure if this is just the Longtou rally or maybe the Wukan rally, which presumably also took place), and as an overtly religious-Christian source, i'm not sure that it's terribly independent of CIA/RFA/NTDTV. If no other reports turn up, then i do agree that the sourcing is rather thin. Boud (talk) 15:19, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Collaborative maps need editors: Wukan and Longtou
If someone knows enough about precisely where Wukan and Longtou are, then editing the locations on WikiMapia (CC-BY-NC-SA) or OpenStreetMap (CC-BY-SA) could help sort out confusion on the issue: http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?mlat=22.92302&mlon=115.64048&zoom=12&layers=B000FTF or http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=22.9160256&lon=115.6012344&z=12&l=0&m=b, respectively. OpenStreetMap is less developed, but CC-BY-SA is likely to develop more in the long term. This article (and talk page) are CC-BY-SA. Boud (talk) 21:57, 19 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Google Maps shows Wukan (Wukan cun, i.e. Wukan Village) by the seaside, near the mouth of the eponymous river, at http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22.885111,115.667753&ll=22.885111,115.667753&spn=0.019176,0.045533&t=m&z=15&vpsrc=6 ; similarly on their Chinese version, ditu.google.cn. This is some 4 km south from the downtown Lufeng (which is what the openstreetmap.org coordinates point to). There is no reason to doubt Google Maps presentation on this - they are pretty good with place names like this in my experience. -- Vmenkov (talk) 04:26, 20 December 2011 (UTC)


 * As mentioned by User:Boud above, Google Maps shows N, S, and Middle Longtoucun Rd (i.e. Longtou Village Rd.) just northwest of downtown Lufeng, but the entire neighborhood is labeled Longguang(cun) rather than Longtou(cun). This is at http://maps.google.com/maps?q=longtoucun&hl=en&ll=22.922785,115.64003&spn=0.01917,0.045533&sll=22.863917,115.72114&sspn=0.038357,0.117245&vpsrc=6&hnear=Long+Tou+Cun+Bei+Lu,+Lu+Feng+Shi,+Shanwei,+Guangdong,+China&t=m&z=15, some 6 km to the NNW of Wukan(cun) (which is a few km south of downtown). Being a few km from the sea coast, this Longguang is not exactly "coastal" though, as reports indicate. So I can't be sure if it's the same one that newspapers mention. -- Vmenkov (talk) 04:46, 20 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the correction - there are plenty of references of Wukan being on a bay - with the fishermen unable to go fishing because of a sea siege as well as the land siege. So your coords are more consistent with the majority of the sources than the ones i found (and if the ones i found are just a third-party aggregation as you say, they're certainly not ideal). As for Longtou/Longguang being "coastal", i don't see that in either the Phayul.com article or the RFA half-sentence - i only see "neighbouring" and "nearby". 6 km sounds consistent with "neighbouring" and "nearby" to me. Hopefully we'll soon have some more sources saying either that the fences around the land recently sold to developers at Longtou are still standing without any sign of being damaged, or that they really have been destroyed and that the villagers are protesting. Boud (talk) 10:08, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Fair use images to import : Chinese wiki to English wiki
There is a list of image to import to the English wikipedia as soon as possible : zh:media:The_Wukan_Event_people_1.jpg, zh:media:Wukan_2011.jpg, zh:media:The_Wukan_News_reports.jpg, zh:media:Wukan_girl_2011.jpg Yug (talk)  13:13, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Siege ? Protests ?
Is the word Siege really need, I don't think so. Yug (talk)  14:00, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

South Asian newspapers
In the international media section, someone for the second time didn't like referring to a mainstream newspaper quote when the newspaper is not from the USA or the UK. This is not the UK_US.wikipedia.org, it is an English-language encyclopedia about the world. So a quote by a major South Asian mainstream newspaper is perfectly acceptable, along as it's NPOV-ed in the same way as for other mainstream English-language newspapers.

For people who have difficult clicking on The Hindu to learn more about the newspaper, here is a quote (without wiki markup) of the first paragraph in the lead:
 * The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009.[2] The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40 million in 2010. According to the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2010 The Hindu is the third most widely read English newspaper in India (after the Times of India and Hindustan Times) with a readership of 2.6 million people.[3] It has its largest base of circulation in Southern India, especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It is the most widely read English daily in Kerala. Headquartered at Chennai (formerly called Madras), The Hindu was published weekly when it was launched in 1878, and started publishing daily in 1889.

Click on the Wikipedia article The Hindu to learn more and see the references. Boud (talk) 15:31, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

potential resources
See Land grabbing 99.19.45.64 (talk) 04:04, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Grim future for Wukan model by Willy Lam Asia Times Online 11.Jan.2012; excerpt ...
 * No news from Wukan: protests are far from an isolated anomaly by Evelyn Chan, 12 January 2012 openDemocracy.net
 * Australian FM doubts 'Arab Spring' for China in Agence France-Presse, example excerpt "In bold defiance of China's rulers, residents of the village of Wukan in southern Guangdong province last month drove out party officials and held out for more than a week after complaining about land grabs."
 * China has seen the enemy and it’s us by Troy Parfitt Toronto Star Jan.07.2012 excerpt ...

Article title again
Would there be any opposition to renaming this article "Wukan protests"? "Protests of Wukan" sounds as though the villagers might be protesting against Wukan.Homunculus (duihua) 18:00, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I support this, we just need to contact an admin, since that page is a redirect. Colipon+ (Talk) 15:09, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't see any ambiguity, but I support move. The 'of' is clearly redundant, and there are many articles titled similar to the desired target name. -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 15:26, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Problems with Epoch Times source
I think that the information cited from this article is problematic and I would like to delete it, but I think that some editors might disagree. This source is confusing (and possibly misleading) for two reasons.


 * 1) The article gives (possibly) exaggerated figures without attributing them to a source or giving a context of time or place. The article begins citing its figures by stating "It is estimated that...". It isn't clear whose figures these are: they may be from an academic source, from the author, or from anywhere else. Without saying whose estimates these are the following statistics are confusing, misleading, and cannot be verified.
 * 2) The article says that "60 to 70 percent of local government income comes from selling land to developers". This is confusing and misleading because it is not clear which "local governments" supposedly do this, and over what time period. What exact level of government is a "local government"? (I.e. Prefecture? County? Town? Village? Or something else?) Is this meant to be an average of total "local government" revenue across China, only of particular regions, or only of one region? Because there is no time period cited, this statistic becomes impossible to interpret meaningfully: was this just in 2011, from another year, or is it something that has been constant for the last decade or longer? Who knows!?)

If any editor disagrees with the deletion of this article and its information, and can interpret the article better than I am able to, please let me know and tell me why it should be retained.Ferox Seneca (talk) 06:47, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * You have identified real problems with the reporting which violates WP:WEASEL. It's bad enough if a Wikipedia article is so written, let alone a source we make use of, and I would support removing the source and the problematic text cited therefrom. -- Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 11:21, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * In reviewing some additional sources, it's apparent that estimates vary significantly, and they also change quite a lot from year to year. There are a couple sources that cite Tsinghua professor Guan Qingyou for the estimate that land sales accounted for 74% of local government revenue in 2010, but other estimates are much more modest. There is some indication that "local" refers to municipal and county governments, though for the most part the authors just write "local governments." Some examples:
 * Dec 7, 2011: Financial Times reports that "Land sales typically account for about 40 per cent of local government revenues which Chinese city and county governments rely on to finance large infrastructure projects."
 * January 5, 2012: One month later, the Financial Times writes "...the shortfall in land revenues will make life more difficult for local governments. Guan Qingyou, a researcher at Qinghua University, calculates that land sales formed 74 per cent of their revenue base in 2010, up from 10 per cent in the late 1990s."
 * Oct 23, 2011: Bloomberg write "Land sales make up 30 percent of total local government revenue and in some cities account for more than half, according to Wang Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist for UBS AG."
 * Nov 2 2011: WantChina Times reports on Guan Qingyou's findings that in 2011, land sales made up 74.14% of local government revenue
 * Dec 2010: a Chinese professor of finance tells what I assume to be a reporter from UPenn's business school that "By most estimates, land sales and taxes account for between 40% and 60% of local government revenues."
 * It may be appropriate to make a generic statement that land sales account for a significant portion of local government revenue, or alternately to provide a range of estimates. Homunculus (duihua) 14:58, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
 * This is excellent research. I will rewrite the sentence with this information.`Ferox Seneca (talk) 21:50, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Beat you to it, but feel free to edit my contributions. Homunculus (duihua) 21:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

New article
"Wukan villagers' experiment with democracy has been hard going" published today in the South China Morning Post. --  Ohconfucius  ping / poke 14:43, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

New events:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-wukan-idUSKCN0Z405O?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

"directly elected and popular village chief Lin Zuluan had been arrested for abusing his position to take bribes."

"A villager who declined to be identified said that outraged villagers tried to surround the local police station in protest.Hundreds of riot police and other security personnel swarmed into the village, however, and several arrests were made." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.112.144.10 (talk) 05:34, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

"Democracy"
The word "democracy" appears twice in the article, and not at all in the lead section. Democracy is why this event is so notable, yet you wouldn't know it. Just reads like another confusing backwater unrest over corruption. -- Green  C  19:54, 16 September 2016 (UTC)
 * That may be a bit in eye of the beholder, but i agree the democracy aspect (free local elections) should be mentioned in the lead clearly.--Kmhkmh (talk) 06:47, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Given the prevalence of both protests and other village-level elections in China, the additional democratic freedoms Wukan enjoyed for five years are the central reason for it's notability, to the point where media referred to Wukan as the 'democracy village.' I may edit the lead, but wanted to post here first, since this conversation has been dormant for a few months. cshirky (talk) 10:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Population: 12,000 or 13,000 or 20,000?
The lead says 12,000. The body says 20,000. The Wukan article says 13,000. cshirky (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 10:47, 6 February 2017 (UTC)