Riot police fired tear gas over the weekend to disperse rampaging migrant workers in southern China who were protesting over the mistreatment of a young pregnant street hawker by security guards, media reports said yesterday.
Hong Kong television showed seething crowds of workers from Sichuan Province running through the streets of Zengcheng, a suburban county near Guangzhou. They smashed windows, set fire to government buildings and overturned police vehicles.
The report showed riot police firing tear gas, deploying armored vehicles to disperse the crowds and handcuffing protesters.
Though protests have become relatively common over anything from rampant inflation to abuses of power, Beijing has looked especially uneasy over any signs of unrest in the wake of the protests that have swept through the Arab world.
Witnesses said there were more than 1,000 protesters who besieged at least one government office.
“People were running around like crazy,” a shop owner in the area told the South China Morning Post. “I had to shut the shop by 7pm and was too scared to come out.”
News reports said the incident in Zengcheng was sparked on Friday night when security personnel in nearby Dadun Village pushed pregnant hawker Wang Lianmei (王聯梅), 20, to the ground while trying to remove her stall.
“The case was just an ordinary clash between street vendors and local public security people, but was used by a handful of people who wanted to cause trouble,” Zengcheng Mayor Ye Niuping (葉牛平) was quoted as saying by the China Daily.
Other clashes have erupted in southern China in recent weeks, including in Chaozhou, where hundreds of migrant workers demanding payment of their wages at a ceramics factory attacked government buildings and set vehicles ablaze.
Last week, protests erupted in central China at the death under interrogation of an official.
Over the weekend, state media said that two people were slightly injured in an explosion in Tianjin City, set off by a man bent on “revenge against society.”
Despite pervasive censorship and government controls, word of protests, along with often dramatic pictures, spreads fast in China on mobile telephones and the Internet, especially on popular microblogging sites.
In 2007, China had more than 80,000 “mass incidents,” up from more than 60,000 in 2006, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Many involved no more than about a dozen participants protesting against local officials over complaints about corruption, abuse of power, pollution or poor wages.
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