Recently, dozens of villagers in Xing’an County, Guangxi were arrested by riot police who broke into their homes in the middle of the night. The cause of the incident was that the villagers were holding a court judgment document to demand the restoration of agricultural and forest land illegally occupied by a “village bully” and his group five years ago.
According to a report from the Netease account “Public Letters,” in the early hours of August 17th, over 3 a.m., villagers in Lequn Village, Gaoshang Town, Xing’an County, Guilin were awakened by a sudden nightmare – the village experienced a power outage, the internet was cut off, and riot police forcibly entered their homes, conducting a widespread search and arrest. “They were arresting people on sight, taking money and phones,” and “the pillars of the village were all taken away.”
One villager, Jiang Jichu, who suffers from high blood pressure, fainted on the spot upon seeing people breaking into his house in the middle of the night, but he was still dragged away.
His wife stated that initially, the people were going to arrest both her and her husband, but because there was an elderly mother in the house who is over ninety years old, she requested that the elderly mother be taken away as well. Otherwise, the elderly mother would not survive alone at home. This was why she was not arrested, although her phone and wallet containing over two thousand yuan were taken.
In Jiang Xiaoji’s household, where the young people were all working outside, she was left alone at home. Several people broke into her bedroom in the middle of the night, causing the elderly woman to faint on the spot. She had to be taken to the town’s health center and has been in a state of shock ever since, still not discharged.
In some villagers’ homes, their door locks were directly broken by the police.
Jiang Tuancheng and Jiang Zancheng, who work and live in the urban area of Guilin, more than a hundred miles away from their hometown, rarely return home. However, they were both separately arrested in their urban homes.
At daybreak, the police besieged the village entrance for a second round of arrests. At least twenty to thirty people, including elderly and women, were arrested.
Currently, it has been confirmed that at least 23 people have been arrested. Among them, the families of He Xiuxiang and Tang Meilan received phone calls from the local police station, informing them that they had been criminally detained for “gathering to disrupt public order” and had been sent to the second detention center in Guilin.
The report mentioned that as of now, none of the arrested villagers have received any legal documents at their homes.
The incident dates back to 2019. According to villagers quoted in the report, the “village bully” Liao Yuanhong in 2019 “introduced” a stone mining company named “Yanggu Mineral Products.” Through various means such as forging contracts and changing land names to deceive approvals, they forcibly occupied over thirty mu of agricultural and forest land from the villagers to build a stone mining site. Since then, the local villagers have had no peace.
Only about 300 meters away from the village, the stone mining site operates day and night, causing problems in the village such as cracks in houses, land subsidence, well water leakage, and the river running dry.
The villagers elected representatives, including Liao Hongqing and Jiang Jilin, to petition for their rights, but these seven individuals were later arrested by the authorities. In December 2023, Xing’an County sentenced the seven individuals for “gathering to disrupt social order.”
One of the sentenced, Jiang Jihua, is a retired teacher who returned to live in the village after retirement. He did not participate in the village’s rights activities, but when his brother Jiang Jilin was arrested, he went to Beijing to hire a lawyer for him. However, he was intercepted in Baoding with the same charge and sentenced to a year and six months in prison.
The villagers refused to accept the judgment and insisted on appealing.
Jiang Tuancheng, who was arrested in Guilin urban area, is Jiang Jihua’s son, and Jiang Zancheng is Jiang Jilin’s son. They had previously gathered a large amount of evidence and filed an administrative lawsuit in court, accusing Yanggu company of illegally occupying the village’s collective agricultural land to build roads and houses.
Their efforts led to a court ruling on February 6th of this year, where Xing’an County Court determined that Lequn Village did have 12.6552 mu of collective forest land that the stone mining site had unlawfully changed the land’s nature, constituting illegal occupation. However, the villagers’ request to restore the land’s original state was left unanswered, prompting them to block the road while holding the court’s judgment document, demanding the land be restored.
The report highlighted that when the mining site encroached on the villagers’ farmland and forest land, no one intervened; yet, when the villagers tried to address the issue by blocking the road, they were immediately met with the local police’s “8.17 mass arrest.”
Furthermore, on June 14th of this year, the Guilin Intermediate People’s Court overturned the original verdict due to “unclear facts,” sending the case back for retrial. By then, the individuals had been detained in the detention center for nearly two years, with only retired teacher Jiang Jihua being released upon completion of his sentence.