Hostages Held in Chinese Village Standoff

By Radio Free Asia
08 November 2006

HONG KONG—Thousands of angry villagers have surrounded a granary in southern China, holding hostage several hundred guests at the building’s opening ceremony and demanding payment for land they say they were forced to sell at below-market rates, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.

In the afternoon of Nov. 8, village sources told RFA’s Mandarin service, officials from various levels of government and more than 100 overseas Chinese from Thailand, Germany, England, and Hong Kong attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the just-completed granary built on what had been farmland in Sanzhou village, in Guangdong province.

At around 4:00 p.m., thousands of Sanzhou villagers surrounded the granary to prevent attending officials and guests from leaving. Early Thursday local time, Nov. 9, approximately 300 people remained trapped in the granary’s administrative building, the sources said.

At 1:00 a.m. local time, some 4,000 villagers remained at the scene, witnesses said.

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