BEIJING: An estimated 20,000 people clashed with the police in Hunan Province late last week, as a protest over rising transportation costs escalated into a riot, witnesses and overseas news reports said.
On Monday, truckloads of armed police officers descended on an area of rural Hunan near the village of Zhushan to restore order. Some witness accounts on an overseas Chinese Web site, Boxun, claimed that demonstrators had refused to leave government offices in the area and that the riot police had used force to remove them.
Several protesters and police officers were injured, Reuters reported. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong reported that one protester had been killed in a skirmish.
Mainland Chinese news media did not carry reports about the unrest, which occurred during the annual two-week session of the Communist Party's legislative body.
The protests were said to have been set off by concern about the inflated prices charged for public transportation during the Lunar New Year holiday in February.
The government has taken a series of steps to improve conditions for peasants and migrant workers in recent years, and officials have claimed that incidents of rural unrest declined in 2006.
But officials acknowledge that discontent remains widespread and that China's rapid growth has not done enough to lift living standards for peasants and migrant workers.
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