Where Wukan has led, Beijing will not follow Elections in Wukan are like buses. Nothing, then three come along at once. Last week, the rebellious fishing village in Guangdong province, southern China, voted in a party-like atmosphere for members of an election committee. This weekend they will pick ombudsmen. Finally, next month - if they are not sick of all this voting - they will elect new village leaders to replace the ones they chased out in December. With such a whirl of civic activity, it's amazing they get any fishing done. The festival of would-be democracy follows an extraordinary chain of events that began in September when villagers ransacked the offices of local leaders and attacked the police station. They were angered by a series of allegedly corrupt deals depriving them of much of the village's communal land. Police retaliated by beating protesters and arresting leaders, one of whom died in custody. In December, protesters struck back, taking control of the village. In a tenser version of the 1949 British comedy Passport to Pimlico, in which residents of a London district declare independence, Wukan barricaded itself off from the rest of China. It set up a media centre and what it cheekily termed a foreign ministry. A siege ensued as armed police cordoned off the area and sought to starve villagers out. Many expected the rebellion to be crushed in a repetition of Tiananmen Square. Instead, senior provincial party officials agreed to fresh elections and to investigate the land deals. Wukan distils some of China's most pressing issues: land, fairness and representation. It has also unfolded in public thanks to villagers" nous in getting the story to the media. Thousands of similar protests are quietly quashed, their leaders bribed or intimidated. Land lies at the core of the dispute. China's economic progress of the past 30 years is in large part the trick of conjuring private wealth out of communal property. Winners and losers have been determined by who got the land and how much they paid for it. In the countryside, officials" favourite trick is to acquire agricultural land, then switch it to more valuable commercial use. Thus fortunes have been won and ceded. That is why the Chinese, as well as celebrating the country's new-found wealth, also hold it in great suspicion. In Europe and America, the doubtless brutal events that determined who became an aristocrat and who a peasant are shrouded in the fog of history. In China, they are happening before people's eyes. While some spirit real-estate fortunes from communal property, others continue to till the soil and send their children to factories as migrant labourers. The arbitrariness is exacerbated by the hukou system, which designates some as privileged city-dwellers and condemns others to scrabble on the land. With the Wukan cat out of the bag, authorities were almost obliged to pay its villagers at least lip- service. An essay in the state-owned People's Daily said abuse of power over land acquisition was "damaging people's rights." Some grassroots cadres, it said, had "lost their sense of purpose." Wen Jiabao, the premier whose progressive-sounding interjections rarely gel with actual policy, opined: "We can no longer sacrifice farmers" land rights to lower the cost of industrialisation." The other issue is representation. Wukan's villagers revelled in their democratic jamboree. They fashioned wooden voting booths and displayed a gleaming new ballot box. Before the heavily attended vote, they gathered under a tree to discuss the mechanics of running an election. But one should not exaggerate the effects that Wukan is likely to have nationally. Village leaders were savvy enough to frame their actions as a protest against local corruption, not against the system in Beijing. At national level, the party will choose the next generation of leaders without recourse to voting booths. Nor have authorities yet yielded to the villagers" main demands. There has been no proper investigation of the land confiscation. Nor has the body of Xue Jinbo, the villager who died in custody, been released for proper burial. Family members have spurned compensation and refused to sign papers attesting that he died of natural causes. A brief glimpse of the bruises and caked blood on his corpse convinced them otherwise. The authorities have made a bold move to co-opt the rebels, making Lin Zuluan, Wukan's leader during its brief period of "independence," the village's new party secretary. The accepted narrative of Wukan may yet be about how the authorities rescued poor villagers from the grip of local officials. Indeed, one of the chants that went up in the village was: "Without the central government, we cannot solve anything." That is not a slogan likely to unnerve Beijing.