Right below China's surface. It's leaders are afraid of this.
Chinese Street Vendor Dispute Expands into Violent Melee
By MICHAEL WINES
NEW YORK TIMES
BEIJING — Authorities in a town near the large southern metropolis of Guangzhou arrested 25 people after a dispute between street vendors and security guards expanded into a confrontation with bottle-and-brick throwing onlookers, state news agencies reported on Sunday.
The protest, in Xintang town in south coastal China, is the latest in a series of violent protests that have struck Chinese cities in recent days. At least 1,000 riot police officers were patrolling the streets of Lichuan, in Hubei province, after days of unusually large protests over the death of a local legislator while in police custody. In China's Inner Mongolia region, ethnic Mongolians clashed with security officers last week in protests over the death of a Mongolian who had been run over by a car driven by an ethnic Han.
Chinese authorities recorded 127,000 so-called "mass incidents" last year, but most are too small to gain wide notice.
The Xintang protest apparently sprang from a dispute Saturday night between security officers and two migrant street vendors in an industrial area filled with garment factories, the Associated Press reported. Onlookers, many of them also migrant workers, apparently sided with the vendors, and photos posted on the popular Sina Weibo service, a Chinese version of Twitter, showed police cars overturned on the streets.
In Lichuan, a city of about 850,000, about 2,000 demonstrators stormed the city government headquarters on Saturday protesting the death of a legislator, a member of the local People's Congress, who had been investigating allegations of corruption in a city-backed land deal. The legislator, Ran Jianxin, 49, was reported to have been under interrogation by police or prosecutors when he died on June 4.
Mr. Ran had been arrested May 26 on bribery charges, which his family contends were concocted in an attempt to silence his anti-corruption investigation. Xinhua, China's official news agency, quoted a cousin as saying that his body bore signs of an "unnatural death."
Photographs posted online that purport to show his bloodied corpse triggered a large demonstration on Thursday by crowds throwing eggs, bottles and garbage at city buildings. The protest drew a large contingent of the paramilitary People's Armed Police and columns of armored vehicles to the scene.
Two city officials have been detained in connection with Mr. Ran's death, the Communist Party newspaper Global Times reported. Two others, a local prosecutor and a deputy director of the city Communist Party, have lost their jobs, according to Agence France-Presse.
State-approved land seizures for development, which frequently displace residents without adequate compensation or other recourse, are a common motivation behind public protests, as is corruption."
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