Migrant workers riot in China, attack police station

Chinese officials downplayed last week’s incident and said an investigation was under way.

The violence comes just two weeks after a crowd of 30,000 people in southwest China set fire to a police station, angry over what many believed was an official cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of a teenage girl.

The three days of rioting began on Thursday in Kanmen town in coastal Zhejiang province, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. The group said 30 migrant workers were detained. A news release posted on the website of Yuhuan County, which oversees Kanmen, said authorities were holding 23 people.

Three hundred military police arrived in the town on Sunday, said the chief of the Yuhuan County’s propaganda department, who gave his family name as Yan.

The unrest in Kanmen was centered around a migrant worker whom the Hong Kong-based rights group said was beaten by a security guard while trying to get a temporary residence permit. When the worker went with a group of workers to complain to the police about his treatment, he was detained, triggering the protest where hundreds of workers converged outside the police station, burning police cars and motorcycles and later throwing stones, the group said.

The rights group’s report did not say why the worker was beaten. The Yuhuan propaganda official Yan denied the migrant worker, Zhang Zhongfu, had been beaten and said Zhang was drunk when he went to get his temporary residence permit. “He knocked his head on the wall by himself,” Yan said.

He said more than 20 workers, not hundreds, later threw stones at police and police vehicles. Zhang has been freed, Yan said, but he gave no details.