A SERIES of riots, precipitated by seemingly minor disputes, has raised alarm among Chinese authorities, who are under growing pressure to tackle corruption and improve the living conditions of the country’s 800 million rural poor.

The latest disturbance came after police tried to move on a group of buskers, prompting more than 1,000 people to take to the streets in southern China.

In northern China two policemen were killed when hundreds of building workers tried to release friends being held by officials.

The incidents were unrelated and took place thousands of miles apart but they shared a common theme: violent protest against corruption and the perception that officials are abusing their power.

Central government knows the potentially destabilising effect of civil unrest. Authorities have introduced measures to fight corruption at local level, including harsher penalties for convicted officials. In the incident last weekend in Guangxi province more than 1,000 people clashed with police when local officials beat up disabled buskers, according to media reports. The buskers agreed to move on after one more song, before an official took a photograph of a member of the group. There was a scuffle and the violent treatment of the buskers sparked the riot.

In the second disturbance on Sunday, two policemen were killed in Shanxi province when building workers drove 12 lorries and cars to the local traffic administration in protest against the holding of two workers for investigation over a traffic accident, a police officer said.

The weekend riots were the latest disturbances to be sparked by a relatively minor incident. The city of Hanyuan in Sichuan province was shut down in October when hundreds of thousands of farmers staged a sit-in at a hydropower station being built. They were protesting that they had been kicked off their land without adequate compensation.

Some analysts say that the wave of unrest is the biggest since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

Among the reasons for urban protest are lack of redundancy compensation for workers made jobless by the closure of state-owned enterprises, as well as government corruption and the widening wealth gap.

The October issue of Trend Monthly quoted an internal Chinese document showing that 3.1 million people had participated in demonstrations, protests, assemblies and petitions in September alone.

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