A crowd of students surround a police car, trying to overturn it and set it on fire. In the end, hundreds of young people are able to open one of the doors in an attempt to rescue one of their university colleagues who had been arrested and beaten up by a policeman.

Another video shows a man barricaded on the roof of a house in the middle of a building site. After threatening to set himself on fire and being surrounded by a group of policemen, the man attempts to get away by throwing whatever comes to hand at the police. These two videos of recent revolts in Chinese provinces can be seen on YouTube, the site showing pirate videos which in recent months has caused quite a stir even in the more traditional media.

When in Rome.... The Web highlights many national stereotypes. In Italy television programmes show films of student pranks filmed in schools that were originally published on YouTube, but in the country of the dragon the site, which manages to escape from the strict control of the government, is becoming an outlet for the spontaneous protests against building speculation that are increasing in the less developed southern provinces and on the east coast where building speculation is rampant.

...make videos like the Romans do. A spontaneous protest by two-thousand students in which five people were arrested broke out after a young girl was hit by policemen when they caught her selling things in the street to supplement her meagre wages. The video shot by students shows the police taking the girl away as they are surrounded by students shouting “Let her go!” and trying to set the police car on fire. The protest continued until midnight. The morning after, the local police chief announced that the girl was in hospital but in good condition, and that an investigation had been opened into the incident and four policemen and an inspector had been arrested while two detectives had been kicked off the force.

 

Buckets of urine thrown over them. This was the unusual protest made by a married couple who didn’t want to be evicted from their home near the southern town of Qingdao, on the Korean Sea.

The couple involved, as another video shows, barricaded themselves on the roof of their home, tried to set themselves on fire and then threw buckets of excrement over police before being dragged away. The couple were protesting against the confiscation of their home built, “abusively” according to the local authorities, on land where a shopping centre is due to be constructed in the village of Hexi. The daughter of the couple told a dissident site that the family needed the 40-square-metre shack because they didn’t have anywhere else to go and live with their two gravely ill old parents.

Judges in the province of Shandong subsequently sentenced Yuan Xinyu and his wife moglie Zheng Fangshi to 18 months prison for “attempting to cause a fire”, a verdict that provoked demonstrations by fellow citizens of the couple to demand their liberation.

The new housing law passed in March by the People’s Assembly is very vague about the confiscation of collective property, given that land rights in China are state owned. “The couple in Hexi produced documents showing their ownership rights, which is why they claimed the confiscation was illegal”, Teng Biao, a lawyer, told the ‘Radio Free Asia’ site.

The contagion is spreading. The protests of recent weeks have had unprecedented publicity, despite claims by the Internal Ministry that protests fell by 22% in 2006. In 2004 there were 3,800,000 registered in a total of 74,000 different episodes.

There are even more protests which have not been recorded on video but have been reported in newspapers, including that made by the inhabitants of the coastal town of Xiamen who banded together to block the construction of a petrochemical plant, or the anger of the women of Bobai, in the poor southern province of Guangxi, protesting against the one-child policy and forced abortions imposed by police, and the case reported in the China Times of a petition drawn up by the inhabitants of Shangai against a new MAGLEV magnetic levitation train line to the town of Hangzhou.