Martial law was declared at the weekend in central Henan province when fighting broke out between the ethnic Han majority and Muslim Hui minority, apparently over a road accident death.
The New York Times reported 148 people had died, though this figure could not be confirmed. A woman who gave her surname as Ma, from the town of Langchenggang near Zhangzhou city where the fighting erupted, told The Australian at least 10 people had died.
"Soldiers with guns came to the villages and told us not to go out. People from outside are not allowed in either," she said.
Thousands of kilometres away in southwestern Sichuan province, villagers gathered at a controversial dam construction site last Wednesday to demand that work be stopped, according to a villager called Yang, from Qingfu village in Hanyuan county.
The homes of about 100,000 peasants will be lost, along with most of the area's arable land, as part of the Pugubou hydropower project that will involve building a $US2.45billion ($3.28billion) dam on a tributary of the Yangtze River. Mr Yang said he saw about 100 armed police try to drive the demonstrators away. He said that by Friday the crowd at the dam had swelled to 70,000.
One villager, a middle-aged man, was beaten to death by police with sticks, he said. About 300 villagers then carried the dead man's body to county government offices.
Officials paid the dead man's family 100,000 yuan compensation and asked them to take the man's body away and burn it, Mr Yang said. The details, however, could not be confirmed.
A worker who answered the phone at the Qingfu town government offices denied the riot had happened. According to a local journalist, the Government's Central Propaganda Department issued an order banning reporting on the incident.
Outside the major cities, where the benefits of China's extraordinary economic transformation are concentrated, protest is rife as social tensions escalate. A Hong Kong magazine, quoting Public Security Ministry documents, last week reported 3.1 million Chinese had been involved in demonstrations during September.
As the gap between rich and poor widens, armed violent protests, reports of which filter out via SMS phone messages and eyewitness postings on overseas websites, have become frequent.
Corruption, workers laid off with inadequate compensation, peasants' land confiscated for development, and most recently, rising food prices are prominent among the reported causes.
There were conflicting reports over the cause of the riot in Henan province. Ms Ma said it started when a 17-year-old Han boy was killed by a truck driven by a Muslim Hui.
"I'm very angry with the Hui. They always freeload on us. There's nobody here to deal with them," she said.
The Hui, ethnic Chinese whose ancestors converted to Islam, are one of 55 minority ethnic groups in China.
PRINT-FRIENDLY VERSION