Rebel China village holds new elections under a cloud

Rain-drenched voters in a Chinese village which rebelled against Communist officials and held landmark democratic elections returned to the polls today in a ballot clouded by signs authorities are reasserting their power.
Wukan, in south China's Guangdong province, grabbed headlines worldwide in 2011 when locals staged huge protests and drove out Communist Party officials they accused of illegal land grabs and the death of a detained local villager.
Protest leaders swept to power in free elections months later, and a poll to choose a new seven-member village committee was held today amid torrential downpours.
But fewer than 1,000 locals were seen by AFP casting their ballots before polls closed, a marked contrast with the excited thousands who turned out for the village's previous exercise in democracy.

Nonetheless an announcer said 8,000 ballot papers had been claimed at the polling station, out of an electorate of more than 9,000.
Staff declined to explain the apparent discrepancy.

Officials from the nearby city government packed the area around the polling station, stoking suspicions that the election was under pressure from higher-level authorities just weeks after the detention of several former protest leaders.
Many residents of Wukan, a fishing village where locals said around 430 hectares (1,060 acres) of land had been illegally seized and sold, have become disappointed with the committee leaders elected in 2012, after they failed to reverse much of the losses.

State-backed land-grabs are a key driver of unrest in rural China, fuelling the majority of the tens of thousands of protests taking place in the countryside each year, according to estimates.
Several villagers said they would not vote at all.
"You can see all these people the government has sent here, they want to put pressure on us," a middle aged man surnamed Sun said, as he sipped from a cup of green tea.
"The result has been decided in advance. So I didn't vote.