Guangxi Land Clash: Villagers Say Pepper Spray Used
On October 9, villagers in Dadong village, in Dadong township under Bobai county in the Guangxi region, confronted a construction crew over a plot at the centre of a long-running Guangxi land dispute. The account below comes from local residents who spoke to Chinese-language media and from footage circulating from the village; no official statement from county or police authorities, and no response from the developer, has been published.
What villagers describe at the construction site
A local woman told Epoch Times that a developer moved onto the land to advance a housing project even though villagers had not agreed and had not signed anything transferring the plot. She said unidentified men used a fire extinguisher, and then what she described as pepper spray, against the elderly people and women who went out to stop the work.
In her words, as quoted by Epoch Times: “They used the fire extinguisher directly on people, spraying them to drive them away. When the extinguisher ran out, another one came straight out with the pepper spray. Some of the aunties were taken to hospital.” The woman said she was not at the site herself and learned of events from videos passed around the village.
Video of the clash, also posted on X by an account that documents collective protests on the mainland, shows a man spraying a white powder from a red extinguisher at people in front of him. Villagers say a second man used a small canister containing what they believe was pepper spray. The composition of either substance has not been independently tested or confirmed. A report by the New Tang Dynasty Television news desk, which carried the same villager’s account, said the footage shows at least three people in police uniforms present at the scene.
Police on site, but digging continued
The woman told Epoch Times that about a dozen villagers went out to block the digging, facing a group she estimated at twenty or thirty people. Because most young people in the village have left for work elsewhere, she said, those who went out were mainly elderly residents and women. She said she had heard that four or five people were sent to hospital; that figure comes from villagers and has not been confirmed by any hospital or official source.
She said villagers called the police and officers arrived, but concentrated on preventing the two sides from coming to blows rather than stopping the construction. “The police came, looked, and stopped them from fighting. As for the other side carrying on with the construction, there was nothing they could do,” she told Epoch Times. The police have not publicly responded to that account, and the circulated footage does not record the full course of their handling of the incident.
A dispute that has flared before
The same plot has a history. Publicly available reporting indicates that a similar clash over this land occurred in January 2019, after which construction stopped for several years before resuming now. The woman said the underlying dispute goes back roughly a decade, to compensation talks that ended without agreement.
She said the other side had offered 20,000 to 30,000 yuan per mu, which villagers considered too low, and that they would rather keep farming the land themselves. “Isn’t it better to keep it and farm it ourselves?” she said, according to Epoch Times.
She identified the man who had assembled the construction crew as a wealthy and influential figure from another village in the same township, giving his surname as Pang but saying she did not know his full name. The label she applied to him is a villager’s characterization, not an official finding.
She also said local government staff had come to the site at night, and that the crew returned to work the following day regardless. She said this led her to suspect that whoever organized the construction had collusion with local authorities, while stating plainly that this was her own guess and rested on no evidence.
What is established, and what is not
As of October 11, work on the disputed land was continuing. Villagers and video from the site show excavators turning over the soil again while residents stood in front of the machinery, including a woman in a pink helmet filmed standing before one machine. That status reflects reporting up to that date and has not been independently re-verified since.
Nearly every detail of the incident now on the record originates with villagers’ accounts and the footage they circulated. The number of people injured, the identity of the men who confronted residents, the contents of the canisters used, and the legal status of the land transfer all remain unresolved. The villagers say efforts to escalate the complaint to higher offices in Nanning and Beijing have so far led nowhere.
