[10] International newspapers described the December uprising as being exceptional[5][7][11][12] compared to other "mass incidents" in the People's Republic of China which numbered approximately 180,000 in 2010.

[10] Since the abolition of agricultural taxes in 2006, local government has been increasingly raising money through land sales to the extent that this is now a primary revenue stream.

[19] The rate of forced evictions has grown significantly since the 1990s, as city and county-level governments have increasingly come to rely on land sales as a source of revenue.

[23] There are more than 90,000 civil disturbances in China each year,[24] and an estimated 180,000 mass protests occurred in the country in 2010;[25] grievances are often corruption or illegal land seizures.

The Jamestown Foundation offers a macroscopic explanation for the rise in conflicts: that local officials, caught between local government revenue shortfalls due to measures by central government to cool the overheated property market and their personal ratings based on their contributions to GDP growth, have resorted to undercompensating villagers for land appropriations.

Projects in recent years have included a palatial new government building and a sumptuous holiday hotel resort that contained a row of 60 luxury villas.

[19] In 2011, villagers alleged local officials had grabbed hundreds of hectares of cooperative land and were "secretly selling" it to a real estate developer.

However, the approval process lacks transparency in practice, and most decisions are taken by the elected village committee with the blessing of the Donghai township – the level of government just above Wukan.

[10][27] The livelihoods of many were at stake: many were facing severe hardship with no land to till, and had difficulty buying food on their meagre urban incomes.

[30] Then as the crowd grew in numbers, protesters became restless and started damaging buildings and equipment in an industrial park in the village and blocking roads.

[29] The news that several youngsters had been seriously injured after being set upon by 'thugs' caused hundreds of irate villagers armed with makeshift weapons to besiege a local police station, where 30 to 40 officials were sheltering.

Video footage shot by villagers in Wukan showed people of all ages being chased and beaten with truncheons by riot police.

[31] Press reported that searches on Sina Weibo (a microblog) for terms linked to Lufeng were blocked a short time after the protests began.

[10] On the third day of unrest, the municipality of Shanwei, which has the responsibility for Lufeng, issued a statement saying that "hundreds of villagers attacked government buildings".

Wang, a strongly-touted candidate for the politburo when the Hu / Wen generation retires, had been projecting a "Happy Guangdong" model of development to level the wealth gap and emphasise social harmony.

[10] Guangdong media published reports that suggested protesters acted as mobs that assaulted and injured dozens of riot policemen.

[10] The Shanwei city government offered to appoint an inter-agency committee to delve into the land seizure allegations in exchange for an immediate end to the protests.

[26] Xinhua News stated that he had a history of asthma and heart disease that forensic investigators had found no evidence of abuse, and that Xue died of cardiac arrest at age 42 / 43.

[35] Two post-mortem examinations were carried out: the first was undertaken by the Shanwei public security department, after which the family was informed that Xue had died of "sudden cardiac death".

[35] On 18 December, Lin Zuluan, one of Wukan's representatives, said that "leaders at a higher level of local government summoned [him] for talks" and that they wished to go to the village.

[45] A survey conducted on 19 December by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong indicates strong coverage outside mainland China, but none of the 200+ newspapers inside the country published any articles.

[46] Some Sina Weibo microbloggers told the BBC that internet searches related to Wukan and the area were blocked after the December uprising started, and villagers' microblogs were deleted.

Xinhua and various state media, which had previously hardly reported the dispute, started publishing articles on 22 December that praised the provincial government for its handling of the event.

[12] However, after the protests' peaceful resolution, The Atlantic concluded that they were "not as unusual as it might have seemed" in the context of China's many small land and labor disputes, describing as "typical" the protestors' pledges of loyalty to the CCP.

As part of the truce with authorities, the governor of Guangdong, Wang Yang, acquiesced to a village election in Wukan: the first of its kind to employ a secret ballot.

By demonstrating his ability to resolve the issue peacefully, Wang has improved his reputation within the Party as a peacemaker who listens and responds to the interests of the people that he serves.

In a meeting with the Guangdong Party congress in January 2012, Wang pledged to use his "Wukan approach" to improve village politics throughout the province.

This protest letter followed multiple attempts to gain redress from direct contact with the developer, Hua Hui Real Estate, that had acquired a 110,000 square meter plot of land in Wukan without the approval of the village committee.

On 18 June, after calls for "renewed mass protests" over land seizures, Lin was arrested by special police who broke into his walled house in the middle of the night.

[60] At the end of December 2016 a Chinese court sentenced nine of the villagers to prison terms between two and ten years for illegal assembly, blocking traffic and disrupting public order.