Groundswell of Protest Feared By Party Officials

Lu Banglie, now missing, feared dead, is typical of the new breed of peasant activists who are giving the Communist party its biggest political headache since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

He was one of the first popularly elected village chiefs in China. In contrast to the students from elite universities who were at the centre of the demonstrations 16 years ago, he spent most of his life - like the vast majority of the 1.3 billion population - as an ordinary farmer.

But growing social inequality, rising awareness of legal rights and the advent of the internet prompted the 34-year-old and many others to campaign in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Taishi, the scene of the beating that appears to have cost Mr Lu his life, has become a symbol of this movement. The protests seek to capitalise on the democratic rights granted to villages at the end of the 1980s, but which have been widely ignored by officials.

Little more than two decades ago, this community on Guangzhou's outskirts was filled with farmers and paddyfields; now many of its 2,000 residents work in the industrial park. But lifestyle changes have failed to keep up with rising expectations. As is the case for most of the tens of thousands of protests each year, frustrations have focused on a land dispute and suspicions of corruption among local cadres. The Taishi saga started on July 28 when 400 villagers petitioned to remove the village chief, Chen Jinsheng, whom they accused of embezzling collective funds from land sales and factory rentals.

Rural unrest throughout China is on the increase. The government says 3.6 million people took part in 74,000 "mass incidents" last year, up from 58,000 in 2003. In April, villagers in Huankantou, in Zhejiang province, beat off 1,000 riot police in a dispute over pollution from chemical factories built on disputed property. In June, six residents of Shengyou village, in Hebei province, 125 miles south of Beijing, were killed by 300 government-hired men seeking to seize farmland from villagers. Last month, hundreds of farmers in Meishan county in Zhejiang staged a demonstration against a battery factory. Hundreds of smaller incidents are thought to go unreported every week.

The tactics in Taishi, however, were more sophisticated than those used by other protesters. Outside legal experts were asked for advice and the protesters used the internet and mobile phones to spread their campaign on bulletin boards and among domestic and foreign journalists.

Human rights activists said they were shocked at the severity of the assault on Mr Lu. "This goes far beyond anything that has happened before," said Ho Wenzhuo of the Empowerment and Rights Institute. "It reveals the mafia-isation of local governments."

Attention will now be focused on the response of Beijing, which has been reassuring investors that it is moving towards a society in which there is greater democracy and respect for the rule of law.