Guangdong Land Protests Spread/ENG

Protesters in a southern Chinese township block a road for more than a week and confront police.

Protests over government land grabs spread across the southern Chinese province of Guangdong as hundreds of residents of Dongguan city took to the streets on Tuesday, facing off with riot police who beat and detained protesters, participants said.

The protesters, from Hengli township on the outskirts of the region's high-tech industrial heartland, blocked a road in protest of local leaders' use of village land and resources, according to microblog posts on the popular Sina Weibo service.

"They have blocked it for more than a week now," said an eyewitness from a neighboring village. "It's because their village leader is corrupt."

"There were a lot of [riot police] there ... with batons and so forth ... and a lot of villagers."

She confirmed online reports that several hundred residents of Hengli's Cuntou village were taking part in the blockade. "Yes, probably there were [that many]," she said.

Asked if anyone was detained, she said: "Yes."

The standoff comes amid a wave of popular protests in Guangdong in recent weeks, and soon after an armed rebellion in Wukan village near Shanwei forced rare concessions from the provincial government, which concluded that the protesters were "right to complain" about graft.

A local resident surnamed Xiang said more than 1,000 villagers showed up at the protest on Tuesday, facing off with several hundred riot police.

"They beat up the villagers, and when they were done beating them they took them away," he said. "More than a dozen people were injured, and a lot of people are in the hospital right now, in the Hengli People's Hospital."

Threats
A second resident, who also gave her surname as Xiang, said a woman had tried to jump off a building in protest of the police detention of her relatives.

"She was injured and detained by the riot police," the second Xiang said. "After that, her sister threatened to jump, and after that they let the [first woman] go, and then her sister didn't jump in the end."

A resident of the Tianya residential complex in Hengli said local residents were accusing the local village chief, who had powerful political connections, of publishing false accounts.

"His father-in-law got him the job as branch secretary, and he owns more than a dozen holiday homes and several luxury cars," the Tianya resident said. "Ever since he took office, the whole village economy has gone into a decline."

But he said that repeated complaints on the part of local residents had had little effect and that state media dared not report their complaint.

An employee who answered the phone at the village committee offices declined to comment on the protest.

"I don't really know," the employee said. "It's very hard for me to answer this."

Pressed for further details, the employee replied: "No one is here right now; they are all outside the office doing their jobs."

Compensation
Villagers told RFA that the village committee had recently sold off more than 500 mu (33 hectares, or 82 acres) of farmland for around 32 million yuan (U.S. $5 million) without consulting them or compensating them adequately.

"They sold off this land at 65,000 yuan [U.S. $10,300] per mu to build an expressway,"  the second Xiang said. "They paid out 3,000 yuan [U.S. $476] to each of us."

"We didn't agree with this; we thought 3,000 yuan [U.S. $4,770] wasn't enough," she said, adding  that villagers were demanding 20,000 yuan (U.S. $3,180), in compensation for the land sale for estimated economic losses of nearly 100 million yuan (U.S. $15.8 million).

"They signed the deal themselves; we didn't sign it," she said. "[Village] Secretary Xiang Rulin signed it himself."

"We had no choice but to block the road, which we've done for nearly nine days now," said another villager. "We want the central government in Beijing to pay attention to our village and help us out."

She added: "We feel hopeless now; they have sold our school [as well as our land]. That's why the whole village of more than 2,000 people is united on this."

Clashes between farming communities and police are becoming more and more widespread as local residents increasingly challenge lucrative property deals involving communal land by local officials.

History
Guangdong villagers have a history of spirited rebellion against shady official transactions, especially where highly lucrative property deals are involved.

In a landmark confrontation in 2005, armed police ended a hunger strike and fired water cannon at elderly residents of Guangdong's Taishi village who were demanding the recall of their village chief, prompting widespread outrage among ordinary Chinese with access to news of the incident.

The authorities also detained and harassed rights activists who tried to help the villagers with their campaign.

And at least one person was killed in an armed crackdown on a similar protest in Dongzhou, near the port city of Shanwei in the east of the province in the same year.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.