Thousands of rural residents in the eastern province of Anhui have taken to the streets and clashed with hundreds of riot policemen to oppose government plans to build a landfill on the upper reaches of a river that provides their drinking water.
The administration of Nangang township, under the jurisdiction of Shucheng county, called a halt to the controversial plan in response to the demonstration.
Residents said the landfill would have threatened the health of 50,000 people living in villages on the lower reaches of the river.
They said the protest started on Friday afternoon. About 2,000 angry residents blocked traffic on a national highway bridge on Saturday and fought the hundreds of riot policemen sent to the scene, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.
Photographs said to have been taken on the spot and circulated on mainland news forums show protesters holding banners reading "We would rather fight to the death than be poisoned to death", "We resolve to safeguard our mother river" and "Please do not harm residents in Nangang".
The images also show protesters scuffling with policemen armed with truncheons and pepper spray.
Other demonstrators, mainly women or the elderly, knelt as they begged the local government to abandon the landfill project. At least two of them were hurt when the riot police beat people, the report said.
A woman who works at a restaurant close to the Nangang Bridge said yesterday that she saw a few riot policemen beat a 16-year-old boy on Sunday night, leaving him with a badly injured arm.
"The boy's mother came only after he had been taken away in a vehicle," she said. "She asked me and my friends about her son's whereabouts."
Wang Xueyu , a middle-aged resident of Hexi village, just two kilometres from the proposed garbage dump, said hundreds of infuriated villagers committed to protesting against the landfill last week.
"But all of them stopped their action as soon as officials promised publicly to scrap the construction scheme on Monday afternoon," Wang said. "There've been no more protests since then and everything is all right for the time being."
An official with the Nangang township government said the project had been suspended permanently. "We made the decision on Monday morning and no more demonstration has been seen since then," he said.
Earlier this month, thousands of villagers in Jingxi county, Guangxi , overturned 10 vehicles and confronted riot police over drinking water tainted by discharge from an aluminium plant upriver. In Fujian province , the health of tens of thousands of people was placed at risk when Zijin Mining Group, the country's top gold-producer, contaminated rivers flowing into Guangdong province.