Officials and police fled. "Now, there is a striking vacuum of authority, and the villagers are not entirely sure what to make of their fleeting freedom.
"As the days pass, the cordons of police officers surrounding the village grow larger. Armored trucks and troop carriers have been reported nearby. On local television, a 24-hour channel denounces the villagers as 'a handful of people' dedicated to sabotaging public order, with the names of protesters flashing on a blue screen, warning that they will be prosecuted. Many here fear this will all end badly. 'The SWAT teams and the police here are acting like they’re crime organizations, not police forces,' said Chen Dequan, a 50-year-old farmer and fisherman. 'The entire village is worried.'
"Lin Zuluan, 67, a retired businessman who is now the village’s de facto leader, said that officials had approached him to negotiate an end to the protest, but that talks had gone nowhere, in part because the officials would not meet villagers’ demands to return all their land.
"Inside the village, citizens hail foreign journalists as visiting saviors, bombarding them with endless cigarettes, bowls of rice-and-seafood porridge and free rides on the backs of scooters. The villagers * * * are convinced that only reporting outside the state-run press will bring word of their plight to leaders in Beijing.
Note:
(a) flummox (vt: origin unknown; First Known Use 1837): "CONFUSE" www.m-w.com
(blue moon (n; First Known Use 1821):
"1: a very long period of time —usually used in the phrase once in a blue moon <such people happen along only once in a blue moon — Saturday Review>
2: a second full moon in a calendar month"
(3) Tom Lasseter, In rebellious Wukan, China, a rare sight: No authorities. McClatchy Newspapers, Dec 15, 2011 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/ ... n-china-a-rare.html
("The village scene as dusk fell Thursday seemed to partly rebut Chinese officials' long-standing argument that without tightly controlled governance all would be chaos. Life seemed almost normal in Wukan. * * * Standing outside the empty police station's gates, a 17-year-old surnamed Lin explained that security officers in the village caused more trouble than they saved.")
Note: The McClatchy Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McClatchy_Company
(based in Sacramento, California; James McClatchy was the first editor of Sacramento Bee (the originator of today's company), which was first published in 1857)
My comment: I had happened upon (2) and (3) on my own. Neither (2) nor (3) had a video clip. But this VOA report alerted me, so I searched wide in the Web, and finally found the cache:
Tom Lasseter's blog titled China Rises http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/china/2011/12/images-from-wukan.html
, whose top billing is
Images from Wukan. Dec 16, 2011.
In addition, in the right column are several video- and image- "postcards."
(6) Daily Telegraph does not report on Wukan today.
-------------------------------------Separately
(1) 耿和：对高智晟重陷囹圄感到震惊. BBC Chinese, Dec 16, 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/si ... isheng_genghe.shtml
(高智晟的妻子 "耿和说，高智晟一直在中国当局的手里，没有自由，她从来得不到有关他下落的回答。高智晟一直在监控下，没有自由，怎么就会突然说他违反缓刑的规定呢？")