Chinese officials told to handle riots better

BEIJING, June 4 (Reuters) Chinese officials should learn from the good example of some provincial governments which have have dealt well with the aftermath of recent serious riots, a state-run magazine reported today.

''The efforts of the Guangdong, Zhejiang and Sichuan governments in dealing with mass incidents have provided a useful reference for other areas,'' Outlook Weekly, run by the Xinhua news agency, quoted Wang Guangsheng, a senior official in charge of social stability in southern Guangdong, as saying.

''Mass incidents'' -- protests and riots in Communist jargon -- fell by 37 per cent in 2006 in Guangdong, and were also less severe than in previous years, the report said.

China, obsessed with maintaining stability, is grappling with an acknowledged rise in social unrest, sparked by anger at a growing rich-poor divide, official corruption, pollution and land grabs without proper compensation in the countryside.

Guangdong, which borders the former British colony of Hong Kong, has witnessed several serious riots over the past few years.

In one of the worst incidents, police and troops in 2005 fired on residents in Dongzhou who were protesting against the building of a power project, killing at least three and drawing international condemnation.

The government has since admitted making mistakes in handling the protests.

Since that incident, Guangdong's police have been reined in and brought more directly under the control of the Communist Party, the magazine said.

''The job of maintaining social stability has shifted from formerly relying only on the police to making it clear the Communist Party and government play the real role,'' He Guifu, Guangdong's police chief, was quoted as saying.

''In this way, the police will clearly do what they are told to do which will prevent confusing situation as in the past,'' he said.

The Guangdong government has also trained more than 1,000 police officers last year teaching them how to prevent and deal with ''mass incidents'', the report said.

The officers were taught to ''think twice'' when using force or detaining people, it added.

In eastern Zhejiang province, rocked by riots over pollution in 2005, officials had to watch videos about mass incidents to learn from previous mistakes, the magazine said.

In the southwestern province of Sichuan, where thousands of people took to the streets in 2004 over a hydropower project that would flood 100,000 people out of their homes, the government has launched a system for evaluating ''stability risks'', it said.

Official figures show the number of ''mass incidents'' reached 23,000 in 2006, compared to about 10,000 in 1994, but already down from 74,000 in 2004.

REUTERS AE ND1612