Chinese police fired into the air to disperse a large group of thugs wielding clubs and machetes who were seeking to evict residents for a new development, authorities and local media said Monday.
The incident erupted when the men descended on a residential area in Guiyang, the capital of southwest China’s Guizhou province, before dawn Sunday, the Guizhou Metropolitan Daily reported.
Even as excavators started demolishing the buildings, the men stormed into the residents’ homes, threatening to kill them if they called the police, according to the paper.
However, police were eventually alerted, and dozens of officers arrived at the scene, according to an officer at the public security bureau in the Guiyang district of Nanming.
“They fired into the air to warn the people,” he told AFP by telephone, giving only his surname Wang.
After the shots were fired, the armed thugs disappeared into the night, leaving clubs and machetes on the ground, the paper said.
A subsequent count showed that five residents had been injured in the melee, the officer told AFP.
The manager of a company that was allegedly responsible for demolishing the area has been detained, he said.
The paper cited one witness as saying there were 200 thugs, although this could not be verified.
According to local media, residents have been involved in a lengthy dispute with a real estate company on conditions that would persuade them to move to make way for a new residential development.
Competition over land is fierce in China and, as the economy has grown, disputes have broken out all over the country over the right to access the scarce resource.
Often, well-connected companies manage to get local authorities on their side, but this case appeared to have been an exception with police deciding to support the residents slated for eviction instead.
