Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

10 The battle of China’s
history: seeing the past
from the present
Introduction: a little incident
On 26 June 2005, in Chizhou City of Anhui province, a Honda vehicle
bumped into Liu Liang. Following this accident, the driver of the vehicle,
a businessman named Mr Wu who runs a private hospital, and Liu Liang
started to argue, and the argument quickly developed into a physical
fight. One of Mr Wu’s companions in the car, a hospital security guard,
reportedly beat Liu up. Liu was later taken to a hospital to be treated for
his injuries. However, a rumour soon spread around the area that Liu had
been beaten to death, and tens of thousands of local residents surrounded
the police station where Mr Wu and his companions were being held. The
protesters demanded that the police handover the detainees because they
believed that the police were protecting Mr Wu, a rich businessman.
When the police refused this demand, some of the protesters turned the
Honda over and burned it, and then proceeded to do the same to a police
car. They then burned the police station and robbed a supermarket
because its boss was rumoured to have given soft drinks to the police.
According to newspaper reports, the incident developed so fast because:
first, Mr Wu declared that it did not matter if Liu was beaten to death – all
he had to do was to pay 300,000 RMB (about US$4,000); and second, the
police were perceived to be protecting the rich (Reuters 2005).
This kind of incident is commonplace in present-day China, and it
sharply highlights a sense of popular antagonism towards the rich and
the police. It does not matter what really happened. It does not matter,
for example, who was responsible for the car accident, whether Liu
really died, whether the boss of the supermarket was colluding with
the police, or whether Mr Wu had three bodyguards who beat up a
young student (in fact Liu was not young, nor was he a student). It was
the perception that the rich were taking over and the police were on
their side that mattered. Since 1999, Chizhou City has implemented
policies to attract capital by setting investment quotas as a performance
indicator for every level of government bureaucracy. Newspaper
reports suggest that it was popular opinion that businessmen from
Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang had taken over land in Chizhou for
development, with little or no compensation being paid to the local
community (Reuters 2005).
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