SHANGHAI, Jan. 16 - A week of protests by villagers in China's southern industrial heartland exploded into violence over the weekend with thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and using electric batons to put down the rally , residents of the village said today.
As many as 60 people were injured, residents of Panlong village said, and at least one person, a 13-year-old girl, had been killed by security forces, they said. The police denied any responsibility, saying that the girl had died of a heart attack.
Residents of Panlong, about an hour's drive from the capital of Guangdong Province, said the police had chased and beaten protesters and bystanders alike, and that locals had retaliated by smashing police cars and mounting hit-and-run attacks, throwing rocks at security forces.
The clash with villagers in Panlong marked the second time in a month that large numbers of Chinese security forces, including paramilitary troops, were deployed to put down a local demonstration.
The protests coincided with a visit to the area by the North Korean president, Kim Il Jong. The secretive Korean leader's visit, though never publicly confirmed by Beijing, is a poorly kept secret, and some residents said his presence in the region over the weekend may have contributed to the nervousness of the security forces. Like thousands of other demonstrations roiling rural China, it involved land use and environmental issues.
"The police arrived at 8 p.m., and then started beating people from 9 p.m., trying to disperse the crowd," said a schoolteacher who spoke by telephone, giving her name only as Yang. "When this happened, the crowd got very angry and lots of people picked up stones on the ground and threw them at the policemen. After being attacked, policemen were furious, they just beat up everyone, using their batons."
The schoolteacher was talking about Saturday night, which was the sixth day of protests in the area. Villagers said the demonstrations had begun as silent sit-ins, but grew more boisterous by the day, as more and more locals joined in. Eventually, they said, as many as 10,000 police officers were deployed, roughly twice the number of protesters at the peak of the demonstrations.
In a December protest in the nearby town of Dongzhou, residents say as many as 30 people were killed when security forces opened fire on crowds of villagers massed in demonstration against the construction of a coal-fired power plant in their midst. Provincial authorities have acknowledged three deaths, but blamed the villagers for attacking the police. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have restricted access to the village and have apparently ordered the media to sharply limit their coverage of the incident.
Unlike the events at Dongzhou, an out-of-the-way fishing village, the latest confrontation between villagers and a large-scale deployment of security forces has occurred in a rural enclave encircled by some of China's biggest and fastest growing industrial cities.
Indeed, demonstrating residents of Panlong village said their anger had been sparked by a government land acquisition program they had been led to believe in 2003 was part of a construction project to build a superhighway connecting the nearby city of Zhuhai with Beijing. Later, the villagers learned the land was being re-sold to developers to set up special chemical and garment industrial zones in the area.
The region that immediately surrounds Panlong village is among the most heavily industrialized land anywhere, and was the laboratory and launching pad for the economic changes put in place by Deng Xiaoping. These revolutionary changes revived the country and turned it, in the space of a generation, into a global economic powerhouse.
Panlong village is a short drive from Shenzhen, Dongguan and Zhuhai - all large and booming cities virtually created from scratch. It is also close to Guangzhou, the provincial capital, and to Hong Kong, whose investments helped fuel the area's takeoff. The region is not only the scene of some of China's fastest growing industries, including high-tech manufacturing, textiles and furniture - much of which is exported to the United States - it is also the scene of some of the country's worst pollution.
For most of the year visibility over the scrubland plains is so poor that beyond a few hundred yards all detail is lost behind a thick gray curtain of eye-stinging haze. Water supplies in the area are equally imperiled by the pollution. The situation has become so bad that even residents of Hong Kong, whose economy is dependent upon the adjacent region's growth, rue the environmental monster they have helped create.
Increasingly, their ambivalence is shared by rural dwellers in the area, some of the first people to benefit from the opening up of the country to foreign and private investment, which began in special economic zones in nearby areas in Guangdong as part of China's sweeping economic reforms.
"We have many special zones in this area, and each of them attracts investment," said a villager who was interviewed by telephone and gave his name as Hou. "The economic deals set in the past were not favorable, and many zones here have had smaller protests before, but the people were not united."
"Now," he added, "there are uprisings everywhere."