Official rebuke for not listening to villagers

GUANGZHOU - A senior Party official from Guangdong province said the requests of the villagers of Wukan in Shanwei city, where a land dispute erupted in September, were reasonable.

Zhu Mingguo, deputy Party chief of Guangdong province, strongly criticized some government departments and officials for not heeding the villagers' requests, and said the dispute would not have happened if the relevant departments had taken their complaints seriously.

"The villagers lodged two major requests: one was about their farmland and the other asked for transparency in the village committee's work," Zhu said at a work conference in Guangzhou on Monday.