For 24 hours, thousands of rampaging farmers here unleashed their rage over confiscated farmland this month -- holding local officials hostage and, clubs and bottles of acid in hand, forcing a band of private security guards to spend the night cowering behind locked doors.
The riot in many ways resembled other uprisings in rural China in recent years. But this one ended with a twist: The villagers won significant concessions.
By dusk on June 14, the villagers had agreed to let everyone go home -- or to the hospital for treatment -- and officials had pledged a high-level review of 750 acres of rice paddies and fish ponds, property that had been confiscated by the village committee and resold for development in what the villagers said was a corrupt transaction.
Moreover, the villagers said, they were promised an explanation of how the 200 private guards, many with buzz cuts and tattoos typical of Chinese gangsters, came to be in Sanzhou protecting a multistory apartment complex built on a prime piece of the confiscated farmland.
The compromise did not settle the land conflict that has embittered this village-turned-suburb 25 miles south of Guangzhou, in the boundless expanse of factories that has blanketed the Pearl River Delta. But it stopped the violence after only a few serious injuries. More broadly, it dramatized the Chinese government's realization that farmers have a point when they complain that their land and their livelihoods are being unfairly swallowed up by relentless economic growth.
Government steps in
President Hu Jintao's government, in an indication of concern about the unrest among suddenly landless farmers, has launched a campaign to preserve the fields and paddies that feed China's 1.3 billion people. In addition, it has allocated $42.5 billion to improving the lives of the 700 million Chinese still attached to the land and filled official propaganda with stories of Communist Party cadres out in the countryside solving problems for grateful farmers.
Despite the two-day riot here, the first signs have emerged that the campaign may be having an effect. Although party censorship makes information in China hard to assess, reports of violent protests in farming villages have declined sharply over the past six months. This marks a significant shift from 2004-05, when clashes between farmers and police escalated dramatically. The Public Security Ministry reported 84,000 violent protests in 2005, more than 200 a day.
The government has also become increasingly frank about the corruption that often accompanies land seizures, outraging farmers and corroding their willingness to abide by official decisions. Sun Wensheng, minister of land and resources, told reporters Friday that more than a third of land confiscations involve illegal action on the part of local party and government officials.
Premier Wen Jiabao's cabinet last week handed down an order -- the latest in a long line -- barring local officials from confiscating farmland without ministry approval and from using proceeds from sales of confiscated land to finance government institutions. Wen did not address the complaint voiced most often by farmers: that local officials pocket the difference between low compensation paid to peasants and the high market price charged to developers. But Sun said his ministry was putting together a new system to monitor seizures to prevent this and other abuses.
The party secretary of surrounding Guangdong province, Zhang Dejiang, has told city, town and village leaders in this region that they cannot use confiscated land until farmers are satisfied with the compensation. In effect, that was the promise reiterated to the farmers of Sanzhou to get them to disperse peacefully.
Guangdong province, China's most industrialized area, has been a hot zone of land conflicts. Police opened fire Dec. 6 on protesting farmers in Dongzhou village, 130 miles east of here, killing several and raising fears that the unrest was about to rise to a higher level of bloodshed.
Zhang, the provincial party secretary and a member of the national Politburo, came under criticism in Beijing for allowing the violence to rise to that level in his province. Since then, three local officials involved in the Dongzhou killings have been fired, according to dissident sources, and 12 villagers have been sentenced to jail terms.
Livelihoods destroyed
Sanzhou protest leaders, who described what happened here on condition of anonymity because they feared arrest, said busloads of police waited nearby as the riot flared on June 13 and 14. A half-dozen policemen who looked on were not armed, they said.
The villagers said that, although Sanzhou's land confiscations began with decisions made in the mid-1990s, it wasn't until recently that they recognized how much of their land was ticketed for residential and industrial development. In the past few years, a large pond where farmers grew carp has been drained in hopes it can become an industrial park. Municipal food warehouses have been built on former rice paddies. Nearby, a thermos bottle factory has arisen, with an adjacent dormitory for the farmers' children, who make up the workforce.
Farmers seemed most outraged by what they said was use of their compensation by village officials to build a bridge across the fish pond. Needlessly large sums were allocated for the bridge, which is designed as a simple stretch of concrete across a 200-yard bog, they said. "They say they need 10 times what they really need, then they take the difference," a villager said with a sneer.
The head of the Shunde district investigation department, which has jurisdiction over Sanzhou, declined to comment, directing inquiries to the Guangdong provincial propaganda department. Officials there, who according to local reporters have banned reporting on Sanzhou's riot, said they had no information.
Since January, villagers have blocked the bridge-building project, which stands unfinished in the form of two concrete blocks baking under the heavy southern China sun. Many farmers and their wives have sat daily under a tent-like shelter to prevent bulldozers from returning. Banners have been stretched across the tent proclaiming the farmers will not move until they get adequate compensation for their land.
Protest leaders heard earlier this month that a real-estate developer was about to turn over to buyers possession of apartments in a building constructed on another slice of the confiscated land. The developer, they said, sent two dozen private guards in civilian clothes to protect a little sales office on June 11. By June 13, the number had risen to more than 200, they said. Villagers called local police to intervene against the tough-looking outsiders, they said, but got no response.
As the confrontation grew, a number of villagers moved on the apartment building and, threatening to beat them, drove away workers putting on the final touches. The guards counterattacked, and the fight was on. Villagers said they rang gongs, raising the alarm, and by the end of the day 10,000 local farmers and their families were on the scene.
They attacked the sales office, breaking windows and driving away saleswomen. Some used bottles of sulfuric acid to scare off the security guards, they acknowledged, and many swung sticks and threw stones, forcing the guards to take shelter inside the sales office behind locked doors.
Several local officials who showed up to calm the situation were prevented from leaving, the villagers said, and were held all night and into the next afternoon before the bargain was reached.
As part of the deal, the villagers were to negotiate with the developer, who promised to stop construction pending an agreement on compensation. The developer insisted, however, that the level of compensation was a matter between the farmers and the village committee. But the village leadership has refused to meet, protest leaders said, and the local party secretary has dropped out of sight.
"It's been a long time since we saw him," one peasant activist said.