Police patrolled a central China town today after days of deadly ethnic fighting and a southwestern county reeled after protests by tens of thousands marked the latest unrest in the country.
The ruling Communist Party is keen to curb dissent and preserve social stability, but the spate of recent protests and their scale illustrate the extent of grievances in rural China, fuelled by corruption and a growing gap between rich and poor.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ms Zhang Qiyue
At least seven people were killed and 42 injured in central Henan province after a car accident involving an ethnic Han Chinese and a member of the Hui Muslim minority sparked rioting over the weekend.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman played down the ethnic dimension of the protest. "China is a country with ... many minorities, but we have a healthy and good policy towards them. So this kind of problem is only a single problem, just between the villages. It should not be exaggerated," Ms Zhang Qiyue told a news conference. "This is a problem that happened in China, so it's not necessary for foreign countries to know about it."
The southwestern province of Sichuan was grappling with another protest that a resident said had killed at least one when tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets in anger over a hydroelectric dam project that will flood 100,000 people out of their homes.
Residents said they were angry about compensation being offered by the Pubugou dam project to move their homes from a river basin to a mountainous area of poorer farmland. The hotel worker said residents had been offered 320 yuan ($39) per square metre for their houses. Another resident said the compensation had not been decided and the demonstration began after rumours of compensation circulated.
Despite strict government controls, more than three million people staged about 58,000 protests across China last year - a 15 per cent jump from the previous year - according to Outlookmagazine, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party.
Dissent is usually quickly quelled and leaders jailed, but analysts said protests were becoming more common and word of them leaking out more regular as technology makes it increasingly difficult to block news.