Quarrel over toll station sparks deadly riot

[dArKeR]

One teenager died, seven firefighters were injured and 17 people arrested after some 1,000 police officers used tear gas to quell a riot in southern China last week sparked by a quarrel over a toll station.

The riot, which broke out last Wednesday in Xianqiao town in Guangdong Province but was not reported in major Chinese media, marked the latest in a series of incidents of social unrest.

The protest followed a quarrel between a local woman and staff at the Yonghua Bridge toll station, which had long been unpopular with residents.

"The incident arose because a woman didn't want to pay a toll, and was beaten. The station was supposed to stop charging this May," a nearby resident surnamed Li said.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/11/17/2003211425

Why don't us American protest tolls?

[bemildred]

1. China faces up to growing unrest

BEIJING - Government officials were shocked when a traffic incident erupted into pitched street battles between majority Han Chinese and ethic Muslims in a small village in Henan, an impoverished province in east-central China. The government put the number of people killed at seven, with 42 injured. The New York Times, quoting unnamed local sources, said that some 148 people were killed in the disturbance, including 18 policemen.
The incident was just the latest in a string of protests that have taken place in recent weeks around China, and that have deeply worried central government leaders.

In October, as many as 50,000 demonstrators lined up in front of government offices in a small town in Sichuan province and set a police van on fire to protest the beating of a migrant worker, allegedly by a government official. Ten days later, in Hanyuan county, also in Sichuan, an estimated 100,000 farmers stormed a government building and battled police over land lost to a dam project and what they called inadequate compensation. Order was not restored until martial law was declared and paramilitary forces were scrambled to the scene.

On October 29, hundreds of heavily equipped security forces imposed a curfew on university campuses in Inner Mongolia after a planned concert by a popular Mongolian rock band was canceled, according to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center in New York.

And when security guards this month stopped Uighur Muslims in Guangzhou selling fried mutton from a street mall, fighting erupted between riot police and angry Uighurs, leaving several people injured,

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FK16Ad01.html