The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

ights. The Menglian incident involved a protest by
rubber farmers in Yunnan Province’s Menglian County.
The farmers complained that a local rubber company
was violating their land rights. On July 19, 2008,
after the local government had refused to consider
their concerns, 500 farmers clashed with police or, as
the newspaper Caijing (财经,Financial Times) put it:
“the farmers rose up to defend their rights, and the
local government used police to suppress them.” 60 In
the Longnan incident of November 17-18, 2008, city
officials turned away a group of around 30 farmers
petitioning for compensation for their forced removal
from their houses and fields. That afternoon, the disagreement
between the petitioners and the officials
developed into a riot in which thousands of angry citizens
(far outnumbering the original petitioners and
having no vested interest in the farmers’ complaint)
broke into the city government office compound,
smashing, looting and burning, and fighting with the
police and PAP who were deployed to restore order. 61
The Weng’an (瓮安) Incident was sparked by controversy
over the death of a young woman in Guizhou’s
Weng’an County—a poor area with a record of
crime, social tensions, and popular resentment against
the local government. On June 22, 2008, Li Shufen, 16
years of age, was out for an evening with friends, including
her boyfriend, a man of 21, when she talked
of suicide and then jumped from a bridge into a river.
Her friends, unable to save her, called the police,
who recovered her body. The police report held that
Li Shufen had committed suicide, that the cause of
death was drowning, and that she had not engaged
in sexual activity in the hours prior to her death. 62 Li’s
family, however, believed that she had been raped
and killed by the two young men with whom she and
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