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Migrant workers riot in Zhejiang Province, attack police station

Hundreds of migrant workers angry over mistreatment of a fellow worker surrounded a police station in eastern China and smashed cars and motorbikes, a Hong Kong-based human rights organization said yesterday.

The riot, which began on Thursday in Kanmen in coastal Zhejiang Province, lasted three days, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

Three hundred military police arrived in the town on Sunday and 30 migrant workers have been detained, the group said. No injuries were reported.

A woman who answered the telephone at Kanmen’s public security bureau said she saw the demonstration but denied that the workers broke into the police station or burned vehicles. The woman, who did not give her name, as is common with officials in China, said they only gathered on the streets, shouting their protests.

“Break into our PSB? If they did, we would beat them to death,” she said.

The violence comes just weeks after a crowd of 30,000 people in southwest China set fire to a police station, angry over what many believed was a cover-up of the death of a teenage girl by local authorities.

Such incidents are an embarrassment to officials, especially in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8.

The Hong Kong-based rights group said the unrest in Kanmen was centered around a migrant worker who was beaten by a security guard while trying to get a temporary residence permit.

When the worker went with a group of other workers to complain to police about the man who beat him, he was detained, triggering the protest in which hundreds of workers converged outside the police station, burning police cars and motorcycles and later throwing stones, the group said.

The report did not give any other details about the incident, including why the worker was beaten.

A notice posted on the Web site of Yuhuan County, which oversees Kanmen, said “the July 10 incident is being investigated” but did not describe what the incident was.
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