philgorp
08-23-2003, 11:11 AM
please repost this story
source newsday.com
Detoured On His Road To Democracy
Chinese businessman jailed after speaking out
By Edward A. Gargan
ASIA CORRESPONDENT
August 10, 2003
Langwuzhuang, China - A meandering concrete road, dappled by sunlight shining through bordering plane trees, has brought this village of 1,800 souls closer to the rush of commerce and modernization that lies beyond their fields of corn.
Still, this village of huddled brick homes with red, clay-tiled roofs is tinged more with the poverty of the past than with the new wealth radiating from Beijing, an hour's drive away. More than in China's south, villages of the north remain steeped in the rules and slogans of the communist past and harnessed by the petty tyrannies of local autocrats.
The people of Langwuzhuang and neighboring villages in Heibei Province lived at little better than a subsistence level until the mid-1980s. But change has seeped in, notably since the day Sun Dawu quit his job.
Sun, born to farmers here, seemed to have made good with a job in a local branch of the Agricultural Bank, but he gave it up in 1985 to grow fruit on 2 acres of rocky soil. By this year, Sun, 50, had built one of China's biggest companies, an agricultural conglomerate. He opened a bank, built a high school and paved the road linking his village to the outside world.
He also began declaring - loudly enough to be heard nationally - that democracy is the only way to solve the problems of rural China.
In May, on the night Sun disappeared into the black hole of China's legal system, local police came to his office, forced open a safe and emptied it of cash. Since then, he has been held nearly incommunicado in jail.
Sun Dawu's rise and fall is a tale of personal accomplishment and generosity, of communist obduracy and cronyism. It is a tale of rural China.
please read here (http://www.newsday.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=ny-wochin103409166aug10§ion=%2Fnews%2Fnationworld%2Fworld)
source newsday.com
Detoured On His Road To Democracy
Chinese businessman jailed after speaking out
By Edward A. Gargan
ASIA CORRESPONDENT
August 10, 2003
Langwuzhuang, China - A meandering concrete road, dappled by sunlight shining through bordering plane trees, has brought this village of 1,800 souls closer to the rush of commerce and modernization that lies beyond their fields of corn.
Still, this village of huddled brick homes with red, clay-tiled roofs is tinged more with the poverty of the past than with the new wealth radiating from Beijing, an hour's drive away. More than in China's south, villages of the north remain steeped in the rules and slogans of the communist past and harnessed by the petty tyrannies of local autocrats.
The people of Langwuzhuang and neighboring villages in Heibei Province lived at little better than a subsistence level until the mid-1980s. But change has seeped in, notably since the day Sun Dawu quit his job.
Sun, born to farmers here, seemed to have made good with a job in a local branch of the Agricultural Bank, but he gave it up in 1985 to grow fruit on 2 acres of rocky soil. By this year, Sun, 50, had built one of China's biggest companies, an agricultural conglomerate. He opened a bank, built a high school and paved the road linking his village to the outside world.
He also began declaring - loudly enough to be heard nationally - that democracy is the only way to solve the problems of rural China.
In May, on the night Sun disappeared into the black hole of China's legal system, local police came to his office, forced open a safe and emptied it of cash. Since then, he has been held nearly incommunicado in jail.
Sun Dawu's rise and fall is a tale of personal accomplishment and generosity, of communist obduracy and cronyism. It is a tale of rural China.
please read here (http://www.newsday.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=ny-wochin103409166aug10§ion=%2Fnews%2Fnationworld%2Fworld)