China Detains Police Official

In an unusual move, China said Sunday that it had detained a police commander involved in last week’s shooting of villagers angered by land seizures.

The Guangdong provincial government issued a statement saying the unnamed commander’s “wrong actions” were responsible for the deaths. It did not elaborate.

Beijing has tended to whitewash police excesses in social protest cases, analysts and human rights experts say, because security forces play a vital role in helping the Communist Party maintain control over society.

But the shooting of disgruntled farmers in Dongzhou, a seaside village near Hong Kong, came as the former British colony is holding a World Trade Organization meeting this week. The violence embarrassed China’s government and made it difficult to cover up the incident.

“After a clumsy attempt to justify the police action, the local authorities had to dismiss and arrest the police chief to calm down the tension,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a China expert with the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. “These instructions probably came from the central government, concerned about its image and nervous about the overall social situation.”

The shooting occurred Tuesday night after police detained local leaders protesting the loss of their farmland and access to fishing grounds without compensation.

The land has been seized by the government to build a wind power plant.

Provincial authorities, who have cordoned off the village, said Saturday that three farmers were killed and eight wounded in the incident after a mob led by a few “instigators” blocked a road and threatened to blow up a power plant.

Villagers reached by phone, however, have said that 10 to 20 farmers were killed and several dozen were injured or missing. They said the confrontation came after months in which authorities refused to listen to their concerns.

“Our family didn’t get any compensation at all for our land,” said Cai, 18, a Dongzhou resident, who asked that he not be fully identified for fear of retribution. “We all hate these officials.”

More than 70,000 demonstrations were staged in China in 2004, and in recent years authorities have tended to rely on intimidation, selective arrests and minor concessions -- rather than deadly force -- to quell protests. Though there have been cases of police killing Chinese citizens since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in the capital, analysts say, these usually occur in remote areas.

Analysts said Beijing finds itself in a quandary about anger over land seizures.

Though officials have urged citizens to use the courts and various administrative measures to address their grievances, the system is too creaky and corrupt, particularly at local levels, to mete out justice effectively.

This has left the government of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in search of some middle ground, analysts said, noting that the leaders appear to be adopting a strategy of giving way partially in either direction when the pressure becomes too great.

In this case, the central government on Saturday condemned the action of protesters, and then on Sunday announced the detention of the local police captain.

“Hu Jintao has to take such a step because the catch phrase of his administration is ‘social harmony’ or ‘social justice,’ whereas social protests reflect social injustice,” said Cheng Li, a Hamilton College professor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Officials have promised an investigation into the shootings, but analysts say most previous inquiries have not focused on the fundamental problems fueling protests.