Seeds of Fury

The man was almost too scared to talk. "I am just a farmer," he whispered, shortly after the police had descended on his village of Panlong in China's restive Guangdong province. "I know I don't matter." But what he had witnessed does. In mid-January, the man joined a protest against the local government over its seizure of communal farmland, which it then leased to a Hong Kong textile factory. Panlong residents claim the com-pensation they were offered by village leaders was far below what the foreign investor paid. Where, they demanded, had all the money gone? For several days, more than...