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Hundreds of workers protested Saturday at a steel plant in central China, eliciting a promise from the government to temporarily call off an unpopular privatisation plan, state media reported.
Up to 400 workers and their relatives gathered in the morning at Linzhou Steel Corp. in Anyang city, Henan province, demanding better compensation for jobs likely to be lost in an upcoming takeover, the Xinhua news agency said.
They dispersed later in the day, once government officials had appeared, saying the sale of the state-owned company to privately-held Fengbao Iron and Steel had been suspended for the time being, according to the agency.
It was the fifth day of protests, involving at times up to 3,000 people, with unrest culminating Friday when local officials decided to dispatch armed police to break up the line surrounding the plant, earlier reports said.
The China Daily newspaper said the police were deployed as the workers were holding a government official hostage inside the plant, but it appeared that the officers had not been immediately successful in freeing the official.
However, the official, identified as Dong Zhangyin of the local State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, was able to leave the compound early Saturday, Xinhua said.
In a signal of the sensitivity of the issue, Chen Quanguo, a deputy governor of Henan, reached Anyang on Friday to address the workers' "misgivings", a senior city official told China Daily.
The clashes add to recent evidence showing that labour-related unrest may be escalating in China.
Last month, angry workers in northeast China killed a factory manager amid a protest over an unpopular takeover.
Linzhou Steel, which has 5,122 employees, was sold to the private firm last month for about 64 million yuan (9.3 million dollars) without the workers' consent, the China Daily said.
Massive layoffs were then announced, with workers being told they would get 1,090 yuan for each year of service they had put in, according to the paper.
It is not the first protest over the privatisation of the firm, the paper said, citing a situation in March when more than 1,000 workers tried to resist the plans by blocking the streets and shutting off the factory for days.
"I've been with Linzhou Steel for more than two decades and all I got was 20,000 yuan and a letter asking me to leave," one of the workers said on the Tianya.cn web portal.
