Police in southern China have announced they have detained a person suspected of spreading rumours on the Internet that triggered violent clashes and a major security clampdown.
The three-day riots in Guangdong province, China's industrial heartland, last week were the latest in a line of flare-ups in the country, which analysts say highlight resentment towards an unresponsive government.
The public security bureau in Guangzhou city announced on their official page on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, that the suspect surnamed Chen was detained Tuesday and had confessed to publishing false information online.
The clashes in Xintang, a district in the greater Guangzhou area, began last Friday after rumours spread that police had beaten a street hawker to death and manhandled his pregnant wife.
Authorities were forced to deploy hundreds of officers and armoured vehicles as the protests continued into the weekend, with people hurling bricks and bottles at local officials and police, and vandalising ATMs and police posts.
Armed police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and at least 25 people have been arrested so far.
"It was very scary — the scariest thing I have encountered since I was born," Chao, the 27-year-old owner of a denim shop in Xintang, told an AFP reporter on Wednesday.
Chao said that at one point, there were a "few thousand rioters" facing off against a massive police force, adding: "They burnt down one of the buildings."
"Together they flipped police cars and set them on fire. A few hundred policemen then came. They started beating people indiscriminately with metal batons," he said, declining to give his full name.
The man rumoured to have been killed was presented at a press conference by authorities spooked by the scale of the protests. The man told reporters on Sunday that he, his wife and their unborn baby girl were "doing very well".
"The false information spread on Weibo, QQ (China's popular instant messaging service) and online forums had a nasty influence on society," the police said late Wednesday.
Residents told AFP by phone on Thursday that the streets of Xintang were calm, although armed police were still carrying out patrols.
The Guangzhou riots followed hot on the heels of a mass protest in the central province of Hubei last Thursday, when 1,500 people clashed with riot squads following the alleged death in police custody of a local legislator.
Earlier last week, hundreds of people battled police and destroyed cars in another incident in Guangdong, after a factory worker was wounded in a knife attack over a wage dispute.
And late last month, thousands of ethnic Mongols protested in northern China for several days after the killing of a herder laid bare simmering anger over what some perceive as Chinese oppression.
The protests have compounded the jitters of a government already wary about the potential for Arab-style unrest to spread to China, and for rising inflation to spark more violence.
