Villagers said that 3,000 police officers armed with electric batons and teargas descended on the village of Huaxi before dawn on Sunday to clear roadblocks that villagers had set up to stop deliveries to and from chemical plants built on land where rice and vegetable farms once stood.

The scene yesterday was one of complete devastation and anarchy: 40 buses lay smashed in the grounds of a local school and 14 cars were piled upside down in an alley, some draped with police uniforms. There were unconfirmed reports that two of the elderly protesters died during efforts to disperse them, and more than a hundred people were treated for minor injuries in hospital.

In a country where dissent normally brings swift retribution, the weekend riots were just the latest clashes between local authorities and farmworkers, who feel marginalised by the extraordinary growth of China’s economy and the expansion of its industrial base deeper into rural areas.

The 13 chemical plants in Zhejiang, built during the current economic boom and operational since 2002, produce fertiliser, dyes and pesticides. Farmers say that waste from the factories is poisoning the wells that provide their drinking water and that the plants periodically release clouds of stinging gas. They also claim that the effluents are causing stillborn babies and birth defects.

“I’m afraid my children won’t live to reach my age. I want my land back, I want my food back and I want my water back,” said one 60-year-old woman, who, like a third of the 30,000 villagers, has the surname Wang. She was speaking at a makeshift shelter put up by the local old people’s association, which displayed police riot shields, identity cards and helmets, as well as machetes and scissors, which the locals said had been used against them.

Elderly women were eager to talk about the night that they drove the police out of the village. The atmosphere was jubilant.

Soon after I left the village, I was stopped on the road to the county town of Dongyang and detained by government officials for almost six hours.

Chen Qixian, a Dongyang government spokesman, said that 1,000 officials had taken part in the operation to remove the roadblocks, which were set up on March 24 and had stopped production at the chemical plants. Hospitals treated 128 people, of whom 36 were still inpatients. Of these, three were villagers and the rest police or cadres. Five were seriously injured. The factories have suspended operations as many labourers are too frightened to report for work.

In China, farmers do not own the land; they receive 30-year leases from the State that allows the Government to reallocate the land for industrial use without the consent of the farmers if it is approved by the village committee.

Farmers have been given compensation, but for many this is not enough. “It’s not compensation we want, we don’t want these plants beside us,” Wang Weikang, a smallholder, said.

“I tried to grow cauliflower last year, but the plant didn’t grow bigger than a walnut before it shrivelled and died. The groundwater is completely poisoned.”

Landgrabbing and rural land rights are big political issues in China and the government has made public commitments to bridge the gap between urban rich and rural poor.

Recent riots in China have often been sparked by demonstrations of public anger with local corruption or abuse of privilege. More than three million people staged about 58,000 protests nationwide in 2003, according to the latest available official figures. The number of demonstrations jumped 15 per cent from the previous year.

In widespread demonstrations against Japan, sparked by Tokyo’s approval of a revised history book in schools, rocks were thrown at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and Japanese students were beaten up. The textbook is said to whitewash Japan’s brutal wartime colonisation of Asian nations.

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