Residents of Yilong Village “attacked the Jinrui Industrial Park in Xiaolan Town, and took part in attacking, smashing, looting and arson,” the Zhongshan city public security office said on its blog.

Reports that villagers died in the latest eruption of land unrest were untrue, the Zhongshan police bureau said in a statement.

The Zhongshan police said the dispute over a patch of land had festered since August and become so heated that factories in the area had to halt production.

Caixin Magazine, a Chinese business journal, reported that the dispute was sparked by complaints that a former village official had illicitly sold off land without paying residents compensation.

The protest underscores the continuing rise of “mass incidents” as a means to address specific grievances in China. Last month, hundreds of angry migrants rioted in Zhejiang province over a tax policy that was subsequently revoked, and a September land grab protest in Guangdong lasted four days as local officials broke with tradition in deploying uniquely “light-handed” tactics to deal with the crowds.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guangdong, land grabbing, mass incidents, riot
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Michael Clift is a sixth-generation Liverpool Plains farmer, his family having worked the rich black soil of the NSW region for 175 years.

But the likelihood of the 41-year-old father of three passing the property into the hands of a seventh generation is rapidly diminishing as Chinese-controlled mining giant Shenhua Watermark Coal continues its sweeping purchase of the coal-laden farms that make up the area, 500km northwest of Sydney.

Mr Clift, who runs a 2000ha grain farm in Breeza, a small Liverpool Plains town on the outskirts of Gunnedah, is one of the few farmers to have resisted the temptation to sell to Shenhua, which, The Australian revealed yesterday, has so far bought 43 properties in the area over the past two years ….

Mr Clift does not begrudge those who have sold up and moved out. All but one of the neighbouring properties are now owned by Shenhua. But he’s “disgusted” at how the federal government’s failure to regulate such a large-scale foreign takeover of valuable farming land has effectively killed a local community, turning it from a farming region to a mining hub almost overnight.

“A community has been torn apart – everyone’s gone,” he said.

TIME recently asked whether the Australian economy was becoming “dangerously dependent” on China, while one economist claimed that the government’s recent budget “comes with a ‘made in China’ stamp”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia, coal, coal mining, land grabbing, Shenhua
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© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: land grabbing, urban development
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