BEIJING – A Chinese activist who witnessed a clash between farmers and police in which one person was reportedly killed said Wednesday he was taken away and warned by police not to speak with the media.
Zhang Zilin, a human rights activist, was among the most outspoken witnesses to Monday's violent end to a protest against rising bus fares by 20,000 residents of the southern Chinese village of Zhushan in Hunan province.
Zhang told reporters that baton-wielding riot police beat the protesters – including women, children and the elderly – who fought back with bricks and rocks.
On Tuesday evening, Zhang was continuing to talk by phone with reporters and other activists when plainclothes provincial security agents confronted him.
“They invited me to dinner and took me to a restaurant. They told me not to talk to the press, not to have any more conversations with the media,” Zhang said in a telephone interview. “They then took me to a hotel around midnight. I left this morning.”
Other activists said Zhang had been threatened with jail time but he would not confirm that. “In the future, I can't tell you anymore about what happened in Zhushan,” he said, before abruptly hanging up.
The telephone number for the Hunan State Security Bureau was unlisted.
Protests have risen sharply across China in recent years as ordinary Chinese vent anger over official corruption, the widening gap between rich and poor, and land confiscations.
In the neighboring province of Guangdong, police dispersed 1,000 protesters in Dongzhou village Sunday in the latest standoff in a long-running land dispute, New York-based Human Rights Watch reported Wednesday.
Officials in Hunan province, where Zhushan is located, appeared to be applying standard procedures in suppressing the protest sparked by the doubling of bus fares, calling in riot police and trying to silence activists.
On Wednesday, villagers said the area was still sealed off and policemen were patrolling the streets. Police had put up notices asking people who participated in the demonstration to turn themselves in.
Telephone calls to police and government officials in Zhushan and Yongzhou town, which oversees the village, were not answered.
“I don't dare step out of my home,” said a villager surnamed Li, who refused to give his full name or other details for fear of retaliation.
The official Xinhua News Agency issued an account sharply at odds with that of witnesses who had said a student was killed in Monday's melee. Xinhua said no one had died in the clash and that peace had been restored and “local life has resumed.”
A man who answered the telephone at the Hunan provincial government office confirmed the Xinhua report and said the student's death “was hearsay.”
Zhushan's tensions stemmed from an increase in bus fares by Anda Corp. over the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday.
Xinhua said upset villagers intercepted a bus on Friday and demanded a cut in the new price.
The operator of the bus company returned to the old prices but “some villagers who were still dissatisfied continued their interception, and a few began to destroy and burn buses,” Xinhua said, citing an unnamed local official.
Several villagers also gathered outside the Zhushan police station and threw rocks at officers, it said.
In accounts given by Zhang and other witnesses, demonstrators surrounded a government building on Friday to protest the doubling of the bus fares. The group swelled to almost 20,000 on Monday and some 1,500 riot police were called in.