An estimated 10,000 people joined protests and rioting in the southwestern Chinese city of Wanzhou, after a market official's apparent bullying of a porter sparked anger against the city government, eyewitnesses and local media said yesterday.
Several dozen police officers were injured in the rioting on Monday night, an official from Wanzhou's Baiyan district police station said by telephone.
One paramilitary policeman suffered serious eye injuries, and an officer from the Baiyan station was slightly injured by flying bricks, the official said.
Hundreds of police were called out on Monday, he said, to deal with a mob angered by the apparent bullying of the street porter.
Porter Yu Jikui knocked into Hu Quanzong's wife as he was passing the couple on Monday afternoon, the local Three Gorges Metropolitan News reported.
Hu beat and kicked Yu during the ensuing row, watched by hundreds of onlookers, the newspaper said.
Hu claimed he was a civil servant and could use his money to settle any problems, prompting many people to see him as a government official abusing his power, it said.
A spokesman for the Wanzhou government said Hu was a temporary official at a wholesale fruit market. He said Yu was not badly injured.
Hundreds of protesters marched to the main government building later on Monday, with some entering offices and stealing computers and others setting fire to at least some police vehicles, the newspaper said. It named six people who were arrested for rioting.
Local residents said some shops stayed closed on Tuesday, and that riot police were still guarding the government building yesterday.
Street porters are common in ports along the Yangtze river's Three Gorges, where they are known as "stick men" because they ply the narrow, sloping streets with bamboo poles on which they balance their loads. They are usually uneducated, piecework laborers.
China's Communist Party rulers have introduced a series of measures in recent years to improve relations between officials and ordinary people, especially in poor, inland areas.
The measures are a response to a catalogue of corruption cases that have made party and government officials widely unpopular, and to a growing number of organized or spontaneous anti-government protests.
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