[PatrickHenry]

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/sto...&w=APO&coview=

Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 20 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, according to villagers and a newspaper report Saturday. If that death toll is confirmed it would be the deadliest known use of force by security forces against Chinese civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989, and marked an escalation in the social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside. During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant. Police fired into the crowd and killed a handful of people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. Villagers' accounts of the death toll ranged from two and 10, with many missing. On Saturday, Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper raised the death toll to nearly 20, citing villagers. There was no explanation for the discrepancy. Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for them to fire into a crowd - as the military did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square, when hundreds, if not thousands, were killed. State media have made no mention of the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.

Stealing land and killing protestors. This is what happens when states grow too powerful. Then the information about the "incident" is "managed."