Farmer rebellion flares again in China

Washington Post:

Firing tear-gas grenades and swinging batons, hundreds of riot police and civilian officials battled rebellious farmers for three hours Wednesday, injuring more than two dozen villagers, including a woman gravely wounded when a tear-gas canister slammed into her forehead, villagers said.

The explosion of violence in Bo Mei, between Shantou city, in Guangdong province, and Hong Kong, ended a three-month lull in unrest that has unfurled across the Chinese countryside in recent years, posing a major political problem for the government of President Hu Jintao.

Premier Wen Jiabao, China's second-ranking leader, recently told a group of visiting U.S. officials that the surge in rural uprisings kept him awake at night, according to a person at the meeting. In response, his administration has ordered a $42.5 billion program to improve farmers' lives. Last month Hu also ordered the Chinese military to be ready to put down "mass incidents."

Most of the violent protests have erupted in farming villages over land seizures by local governments or factory pollution that seeps into fields and kills crops. Participants in the clashes here said Friday that Bo Mei's 10,000 residents rose up because authorities tried to demolish a pair of irrigation dikes constructed without authorization from the Guangdong provincial Waterworks Administration.

According to accounts from villagers, about 600 riot police and several hundred civilian officials wearing red armbands entered Bo Mei at 9 a.m. Wednesday. On orders from the Shantou Communist Party secretary, they said, the security forces stood guard as a front-end loader plowed into one of the earthen dikes diverting waters of the Chao Shui River to villagers' rice paddies.

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