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Police turn water cannon on rural protest in China

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Police turn water cannon on rural protest in China

Jonathan Watts
Friday April 14, 2006
The Guardian


Thousands of Chinese villagers have clashed with police over access to irrigation water, leading to at least one death and five injuries, the local media reported yesterday.

Amid a rise in violent rural unrest, the authorities used water cannon and tear gas to break up an angry protest in the village of Bomei the southern province of Guangdong.

According to the South China Morning Post, the villagers used homemade weapons, including petrol bombs, to keep more than 1,000 police officers from tearing down a sluice gate they had built in September to divert water to their fields.



A woman in her 30s died after she was struck on the head by a tear gas canister, the Ming Pao Daily reported.

"There was chaos here," a villager told Associated Press. He said residents were enraged when the local government declared the sluice illegal.

Government officials refused to comment, but residents of a neighbouring village said they had little sympathy for the people of Bomei. "Their sluice gate was rightly prohibited because it has a bad impact on all the villages downstream," said Chen Juan, of Xi village. "I saw them throwing bricks at the police."

The scale of the violence was evident from images broadcast by Hong Kong TV, which showed two burning trucks and a road strewn with bricks.

The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has warned that rural unrest threatens national stability. On average, there were 230 riots a day last year, most caused by disputes over land seized by developers in collusion with corrupt officials. Environmental concerns have also sparked angry protests.




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