Journalists were attacked and forced out of a fishing village where China has suppressed new protests five years after the village received international attention for demonstrations against land seizures.
Wukan remains under siege two days after police arrested 13 protesters on allegations that they incited violence and arrest.
The Chinese government is staging a broad crackdown on information about the village, refusing to let journalists in and heavily restricting discussion of Wukan on social media networks.
Photo: Reuters
Reporters from two Hong Kong newspapers, the South China Morning Post and the Chinese-language Ming Pao, were assaulted on Wednesday night while conducting interviews and later detained for several hours, both newspapers reported.
Two reporters from television station Hong Kong 01 were also detained, according to the station.
The South China Morning Post reported that a group of unidentified men stormed into a home and pushed its journalist to the ground.
Ming Pao said some in the group were wearing police uniforms, and that someone punched its two journalists even after they had followed orders to squat on the ground.
The journalists were later taken to a police station and questioned for several hours, the newspapers reported.
According to Ming Pao, a government official asked the journalists to sign a pledge not to do any more reporting.
The papers and the TV station said their reporters were eventually taken to the Hong Kong border.
The BBC also reported that its journalists in Wukan were stopped from entering the village.
Wukan carries heightened symbolic importance after the success of protests in 2011, when its villagers marched against land seizures and corruption.
Facing an international spotlight, the Chinese government responded by letting villagers elect their local leader. The winner was Lin Zuluan (林祖鑾), a former protester.
However, earlier this year, as Lin was set to lead a new round of protests over new allegations of land seizures, he was detained a day before a scheduled protest and charged with taking bribes from developers.
Lin went on TV and said that he had accepted bribes totaling 593,000 yuan (US$89,000).
His supporters staged more than 80 straight days of protests following his detention, even after he was sentenced last week to three years in jail.
After issuing warnings against further protests, the government sent dozens of police vans into the village early on Tuesday, arrested protest leaders in their homes, and fired rubber bullets at protesters.
Social media postings depicted bloodied villagers with apparent bullet wounds. Subsequent posts have shown police posted at street corners.
The state-run Global Times posted a column, headlined “Foreign media fails to trick Wukan villagers on rumor,” that accused journalists of trying to visit Wukan to “wait for conflicts.”
“Even though some foreign media have been unscrupulously inciting, planning, and directing chaos, local police have not resorted to violence to solve the issue,” it said.
The Hong Kong Journalists Association said it “strongly condemns” the violence against reporters in Wukan and called on the Hong Kong government to “take effective measures to protect the rights and safety of Hong Kong journalists working in the mainland.”
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