Exclusive: Clashes over rural plots are increasing, as people whose big-city plans have evaporated return home to face local governments groaning under huge debt
Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums.
Then the tension erupts. A scuffle breaks out, some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.
The showdown happened last month, apparently caused by the planned demolition of a small local temple in a village in Lingao county in Hainan, a tropical island province in south China. Underneath a video of the incident posted on Douyin, a video-sharing platform, one commenter wrote: “Oh, even their spiritual solace is gone. In such a vast world, can’t a single temple be spared?”
The protest in itself appears minor, but these scenes of anger are being repeated in one form or another across rural China, and the number of them is soaring. By the end of November this year, China Dissent Monitor, a protest-tracking project run by Freedom House, recorded 661 rural protests in China, a 70% increase on the whole of 2024.
