© China Daily/ReutersA farmer clears dead pigs at a flooded pig farm in the typhoon-hit Yuyao city in Zhejiang province after Typhoon Fitow flooded the city.
Arrests have been made after large anti-government protests in an eastern Chinese city hit by catastrophic flooding, an official newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Thousands took part in theprotest in the Zhejiang province city of Yuyao on Tuesday and an undisclosed number were arrested for "radical acts", including pelting police with bricks and flipping over government vehicles, the official English-language Global Times reported. It said residents were angered over an allegedly botched response to the flooding and the slow restoration of electricity and other basic services.
Such protests, termed mass incidents by the government, occur regularly around China, sparked by incidents ranging from traffic accidents to industrial pollution and official abuses of power. Public outrage is often exacerbated by perceptions of special treatment for the rich and powerful and by distant and unresponsive autocratic leaders appointed from above by the Communist party.
The threat of violence has prompted massive outlays for the police and other internal security measures, spending on which now exceeds the defence budget, the world's second largest after that of the US.
Photos from Yuyao posted to various Chinese websites showed protesters smashing vehicles and attacking city offices. Some were bleeding from the head after apparently being clubbed by riot police, who were shown massed in their hundreds in front of city hall.
On Wednesday, some city officials said they had no information while others did not answer their phones. The protest was ignored by local Chinese-language media and the Yuyao government's official website, which instead was filled with glowing reports on the city's flood response work.
However, the head of the Zhejiang provincial Communist party organisation department, Cai Qi, called on his microblog for a rational response to the flooding, and said officials had been working all-out to deal with the disaster.
"Who says the leaders have been useless?" Cai wrote. "The leaders and cadres have been working their hardest to deal with this unprecedented disaster and provocations resulting in radical talk aren't in anyone's interests."
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