Villagers engaged in a dispute with a property developer detained several construction workers and burned four of them to death, local authorities said Thursday, in one of the most violent land conflicts in recent years to strike the country's vast rural hinterland.
A statement issued by the municipal government of Kunming said eight people, including two villagers, died in the violence Tuesday in the southwestern province of Yunnan, confirming earlier reports circulating on the Internet along with photos of bound detainees and charred bodies.
Other media reports said the dispute was over land compensation. It has become the chief cause of violent disputes in rural China, where villagers often resort to deadly confrontations.
"If you call it a self-defense, it might be a bit radical, but what else can a villager do when he cannot resort to the law, gets no response from the local government and finds it useless to petition the higher authority?" rights advocate Huang Qi said.
Alarmed by the rising violence, the ruling Communist Party is pondering legal reforms that may grant more independence to local courts in hopes of alleviating tensions between residents and the local governments.
In the village of Fuyou at the heart of the dispute residents have complained about lack of compensation for land seized for a warehouse and logistics center. The government said the standoff between villagers and the developer had delayed the project since May.
Villagers detained eight construction workers on Tuesday when the developer attempted to restart work on the site, the government statement said.
It said the villagers then bound the workers' hands and feet, beat them up, and poured gasoline on them before throwing them out to a road near the construction site.
Villagers wielding improvised weapons later stormed the construction site and clashed violently with hired hands, the statement said.
State media put the blame on the local government.
"It shows the local government has not made effective efforts to resolve the conflict between the developer and the villagers," read an editorial today in the Beijing Times newspaper, pointing out that the villagers had lost fertile lands that once provided them with handsome profits.
The party-run Guangming Daily said the villagers have found themselves impoverished after their lands were seized by the developer. It questioned where the police equipment for the hired hands, including military bags, came from.
