Violent public protests throughout China are happening with increasing regularity as anger erupts at what is seen as the ruling Communists party's inability to enforce laws and guarantee basic rights.

"It shows that they feel the social conflict and the solution is so bad that there is no choice but to protest, given the channels that they have," said Sze Pangcheung, of Greenpeace China.

Sze said "there are no channels to make their voices heard" over the environmental pollution that is affecting their livelihoods and health.

In the last week alone, citizens dissatisfaction with authorities sparked three violent clashes, underscoring what analysts say increasingly looks like a breakdown of the social contract between local party mandarins and common citizens.

"The rapid pace of change in China is increasing these types of incidents because local, powerful government interests are destroying people's interests," said Gilles Guilleux, director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China.

That friction between residents and ambitious provincial party officials determined to attain economic growth led to unrest Sunday in China's southern Guangdong province, where thousands of farmers demonstrated against a government-backed land grab.

Conflict broke out after police detained some protestors. Demonstrators then surrounded the Sanshangang township's public security bureau demanding the release of their arrested colleagues.

Only days before, riots erupted in the eastern Chinese city of Chizhou in Anhui province after a car owner and his accomplices beat up a man who scratched the auto with his bicycle.

Infuriated locals concluded that the owner of the vehicle was an official. On Thursday hundreds of Chinese villagers in eastern Zhejiang province marched on a government-supported battery factory which they said was poisoning their children.

The protestors held 1,000 workers hostage. "Local governments and the pollution-producing companies are connected with each other on a very large scale by different kinds of interests," said Huo Daishan, founder of Huai River Guard, a non-governmental organization concerned about the disastrous levels of pollution in the Huai River delta.

"There is local protectionism and it's very usual that the (local) governments become the protective umbrella of those companies," said Huo.

China's top environment official, Xie Zhenhua, last week said greater enforcement of environmental laws is crucial to stemming worsening pollution that is already among the worst in the world.

Xieh, director of the State Environmental Protection Agency, was quoted by the state Xinhua news agency as saying "some local environment authorities do not exercise their law enforcement duties."

Although the Communist party has ruled the country with an iron fist for 56 years, it relinquished some power to provincial governments when it decided to implement market reforms 25 years ago.

Since then, the dizzying economic development has brought unprecedent wealth but also a host of new social problems broadly centred around the yawning gap between rich and poor.

Visitors only need to visit glittering Shanghai and compare it to China's vast and poor west to see the gaping differences that highlight how 10 percent of China's rich own 45 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent have only 1.4 percent.

The all-powerful Communisty party has always condoned the quick and usually violent suppression of public uprisings but one top Chinese official recently remarked that the unrest was not all bad. "On the one hand, riots like the one in Dongyang are a tragedy and show that local authorities failed to do a proper job," Chen Xiwen, vice minister of agriculture, told a Hong Kong newspaper.

He was referring to an incident in Zhejiang province where residents and police fought pitched battles in April. "But on the other hand, they show that our farmers know to protect their rights, which is a good thing," Chen said.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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