Wukan: Failed Promises of the Era of Reform and Opening

The perception of the Chinese political system as a monolithic entity that is primed to wield coercion against individuals and groups, especially since Xi Jinping ascended to the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2011, suggests the futility of protest and the likelihood of its decline. The reality is vastly at odds with this perception. By all accounts, protests have been on the rise since 1993. According to the Chinese government, there were 8,700 protests nationwide that year. By 2005, that number rose to 87,000. The Chinese government stopped reporting the number of protests after 2005, but Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping estimated that 180,000 protests took place in China in 2010. More recently, FreedomHouse’s China Dissent Monitor reported that 735 in-person and online protests took place throughout China in 2022 between the months of May and October. Surveying the numerous protests that have taken place in China over the last twenty years, one incident stands out both in terms of its duration and the degree to which it captured national and international attention. In September 2011, just two months before the Party Congress that officially anointed Xi Jinping as CCP Secretary General, thousands of villagers in Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong Province, protested illegitimate land sale practices by village officials that stretched back to 1993. Wukan was more than a single protest. It was a series of protests that culminated in the election of a new village committee in March 2012. But the story of Wukan sadly ended in 2016, when a number of villagers, including nearly all the protest leaders, were given prison sentences. The charges ranged from corruption and illegal assembly to spreading false information. One protest leader was ultimately forced to leave for the United States, where he learned of his father’s imprisonment and continued to raise awareness of the injustices suffered by Wukan villagers. The documentary Lost Course (迷航), which won a coveted Golden Horse Award for best documentary – Taiwan’s equivalent of the Academy Award and one of the top entertainment awards in the Mandarin Chinese market worldwide – is an attempt to record the story of Wukan from the perspectives of the villagers. It offers an intimate look at the thoughts, emotions, and actions of the villagers. In this sense, the documentary