Protesters clash with police, damage vehicles in Guizhou land dispute

Over 100 rural residents in Sansui county, Guizhou Province, blocked the construction of a government-subsidized housing property project and attacked local police, damaging five police vehicles on Friday, according to a statement issued by the county government over the weekend.

The statement said the project in the county's economic development zone involves the expropriation of land that is home to 96 households in Bagong township, and accused residents of making requests that cannot be fulfilled under current policy and making several attempts to assemble and forcibly prevent the construction since March 27.

Residents threatened with eviction insisted that only factories can be built in the area, said the government. The statement didn't give any further explanation of the residents' motives for resisting the construction.

However, Web users who claimed to be local residents later wrote Web postings saying that the government had promised to build new factories in which they would be employed in exchange for giving up their farmland.

The local residents said they were cheated when the local government decided to build a housing project rather than factories.

A local resident surnamed Long, who is a migrant worker in Fujian Province, told the Global Times that his uncle's land was expropriated and worries the family's livelihood cannot be sustained after giving up their farmland.

The county government also said some residents placed a coffin at the entrance of the construction site on April 18 after staging a demonstration. After officials negotiated with the residents they removed the coffin on April 20.

Some 100 residents gathered again of the site on Friday trying to stop the construction. They besieged police who had arrived to ensure the safety of construction workers who wanted to leave the site. Some 30 additional police officers and 200 staff members from the county government also arrived at the scene and managed to escort the workers out of the construction zone.

The Sansui government also urged those who created the disturbance to turn themselves into the police. Web postings of the incident on forums and microblogging services have been either deleted or are for some other reason now unavailable.