WUKAN, China — As journalists and bloggers began trickling into Wukan last week, residents decided to put to use a two-story house, once the home of a family that left for Hong Kong some time ago. They turned it into the de facto press center of this fishing village of 13,000.
The outsiders had come to see how furious residents had transformed their village on China’s southeast coast into a temporarily autonomous zone. Their anger focused on two issues: what they called illegal land sales by village officials, and the death on Dec. 11 of a village advocate while he was in police custody. The villagers chased out Communist Party officials, repelled an assault by police officers and barricaded all roads leading into Wukan with tree trunks. The two police stations in the village stood empty. So did the headquarters of the Communist Party committee.
But the press center was a jumble of warm bodies and laptops and tangled wires, sprinkled with empty cans of Red Bull.
On one wall of the living room was a portrait of God staring down from the heavens. Below that was a small wooden cross with a figure of Jesus. And below that, taped to the wall, was a white sheet of paper with a statement in Chinese and English. It beseeched reporters not to call the protest an “uprising.”
“We are not a revolt,” it said. “We support the Communist Party. We love our country.”
Revolt or not, the protest over land sales here, which began months ago, was sustained in its final and most perilous phase by the villagers’ canny interactions with journalists from foreign and Hong Kong news organizations. Mainland Chinese news media were barred from reporting on Wukan, but dozens of reporters for foreign publications arrived here last week after being alerted to the protest by an article in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. They slipped through a police cordon by traveling on motor rickshaws along winding dirt roads and, in one case, by hiring a boat to reach the harbor.
The villagers threw open their doors. They now had the means to wage a propaganda war.
