Angry residents overturned several police cars April 10 during a peasantrevolt in which police officers carrying out a raid were beaten and driven away by 20,000 residents protesting an industrial park that was eventually shut down.
By the time dawn broke, up to 20,000 peasants from the half-dozen villages that make up Huaxi township had responded to the alarm, participants recounted, and they were in no mood to bow to authority.
Peasants and workers left behind by China's economic boom increasingly have resorted to the kind of unrest that ignited in Huaxi.
Peasants exist in a world before the modern division of labor: a peasant must be a jack-of-all trades, handy at everything.
Peasants live to agricultural time; the "world-time", in Fernand Braudel's term, of politics and economics does not directly affect the peasant.
Peasants tend to be more conservative than urbanites, and are often very loyal to inherited power structures that define their rights and privileges and protect them from interlopers, despite their generally low status within them.
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