Some violence in China...

I think we're going to see a lot more of this.

SCENES such as this have become common in China as the nation prospers. Hired toughs wielding pipes and shovels charge into throngs of farmers squatting in makeshift shelters to guard their land. Shots ring out. Six of the farmers lie dead, 48 are wounded.

Video footage of the violent clash last weekend in a village 140 miles from Beijing offers graphic evidence of the battle for control of one of China’s scarcest commodities: land.

China feeds more than a quarter of the world’s population on one seventh of its arable land. Farmers are desperate to retain the fields that guarantee their meagre livelihood. Developers are eager to grab them.

The filmed skirmish erupted in Dingzhou, in northern Hebei province, where villagers are locked in a dispute with officials over land earmarked for a state-owned power plant. Since 2003, the villagers have refused compensation from Hebei Guohua Power and have been squatting on the property.

In April, 20 youths attacked them at night to try to force them off the land. The villagers captured one man, Zhu Xiaorui, 23, who said that he had been paid 100 yuan (£6.50) to beat people up, a Chinese newspaper said in an unusually frank report. He did not say who had paid him.

On Saturday, near dawn, they struck again. Scores of men, some wearing army fatigues and hard hats, charged in swinging poles, shovels and hoes at the villagers. They surged between makeshift tents as the villagers fought back, hurling stones and clods of earth. But their fightback ended in death and disaster.

This was not an isolated incident. In 2003 there were about 58,000 protests over grievances ranging from pension payments and corruption to land grabs and loss of jobs. The figure comes from the ruling Communist Party, whose leaders see social instability as their worst nightmare. To underscore their fears, hundreds of farmers protested in a suburb of Beijing yesterday against their forced eviction to make way for an Olympic stadium and watersports complex. The Maxingzhuang villagers said that their properties had been seized but no compensation or resettlement offered.

Several years ago, I took a cruise down the Yangtze to see the three gorges....you could see marks on the side denoting new water levels once the dam had been completed....and, of course, you could the see many villages that had to be abandoned. I am sure the Chinese relocation package is not very good.