The Wukan protests that began last year over illegal land seizure might have seemed, at the start, unspectacular, merely another in the hundreds of rallies that happen every year in China. But with each passing day — and each development reported breathlessly by embedded reporters — the demonstrations revealed themselves to be a bit more unique, with the power to effect actual change. Most important, the protests proved different in the result: the villagers won. Instead of crushing dissent, provincial Party officials agreed to punish those responsible, and return land. Elections were held — yes, elections — to determine new local leaders, and just like that, Wukan became a de facto experiment in small-scale democracy with Chinese characteristics.

Whether you believe the experiment is working — or at least willing to give it more time, such as the Atlantic, which writes, “it wouldn’t be democracy without efforts by citizens to hold their elected officials accountable” — or not working — like Reuters, which reports, “On the first anniversary of an uprising that gave birth to the experiment, more than 100 villagers rallied outside Wukan’s Communist Party offices to express anger at what they saw as slow progress by the village’s democratically elected governing committee to resolve local land disputes” — the journey has been quite remarkable.

So on this, the one-year anniversary (give or take) of the start of the Wukan protests, we’d like to present the documentary Wukan, produced by iSun TV. It’s a chance to revisit the protests from the start and get a rare on-the-ground look at the people involved. The DVD will be released in Hong Kong on October 14, but you can watch the film in its entirety, with English subtitles, on YouTube (embedded above).

(H/T Alicia)

Some reporters got “assaulted” in Panhe, Guangdong, and though we don’t know the extent of anyone’s injuries (just a minor detail, right guys?), MSNBC’s “Behind the Wall” China blog decided to “report” on the incident, using a Foreign Correspondents Club of China email as its primary source (they don’t mention it’s an email; just a minor detail, right guys?). The title of the post? “Journalist beatings ease Wukan optimism.”

Huh. That’s quite an extrapolation.

But you know what other detail MSNBC chose to ignore? Oh, just that, according to the Shanghaiist, a couple of those journalists WERE COMPENSATED WITH 45,000 RMB.

The Shanghaiist doesn’t explicate, but we’re led to believe the journalists took the money. Maybe we shouldn’t assume that, but no one denies they did. But why would they have been offered so much in the first place? And by whom? What’s going on?

Forget about finding answers in the MSNBC story, which doesn’t even acknowledge that the Shanghaiist broke this news five days earlier.

Here, I need to remind everyone that this isn’t Jerry’s Travel Blog or Susie In The Middle Kingdom we’re talking about. This is a news organization that sees fit to lead off its blog posts with fancy, stylized bylines such as:

By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

Hey, guys: perhaps it’s time to get off your journalistic high horses. Just because you fancy yourself as “established” and old school doesn’t mean you’re above informing readers you ripped info from an email, and you’re certainly not above linking to other websites. Or you could have maybe at least tried to put in a call to some of the actors in this drama. Instead, we get the following graf of manure because you feel the print-world need to fit text to space:

To be sure, press restrictions in China have been relaxed considerably in recent years, but since last year’s anonymous calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” local municipal and provincial governments appear especially sensitive to negative press and foreign reporting on so-called “mass incidents.”

It’s unclear whether the Panhe attacks represent a government-driven reversal in strategy for dealing with foreign press coverage of mass incidents. It is nevertheless a stark reminder of the dangers of reporting local disturbances despite the optimism inspired by the peaceful resolution of the Wukan rebellion.