CHINA: Clifford Coonan returns to Huaxi, the scene last year of rioting over land rights for chemical plants
Si Xiaoyan weeps as she tells how her husband, Liu Huirong, was given five years in jail for taking part in riots last year in the eastern Chinese village of Huaxi over the illegal granting of land rights to 13 chemical plants.
Back in April last year there was jubilation when 30,000 farmers stopped 1,500 police from entering Huaxi and the farmers won the battle. Most of the factories are now ghostly, abandoned shells and a gang of corrupt local officials have been sacked. But increasingly it looks like the local people lost the war.
"I miss him," says Si (31), tears streaming from behind her glasses as we sit in a brick farmhouse in the village in the eastern province of Zhejiang.
Around the stout square table sit her father-in-law and other families of the nine people sentenced for rioting in Huaxi when the authorities came to destroy roadblocks erected by villagers to block deliveries to and from the factories. Villagers said the factories were poisoning their crops, causing miscarriages and making their children sick.
Of the nine villagers sentenced over the Huaxi incident, four received suspended sentences, which are often not served in China. All nine said they were tortured in custody.
We are in a farmhouse just off Huaxi's main street, where the riot took place last April. It was a scene of incredible destruction, leaving scores of buses and cars overturned, the streets strewn with bricks and rubble.
Today there are new brick walls where old ones were torn down during the disturbances.
On the way to the village we were stopped by police. The atmosphere is noticeably different in Huaxi and in the nearby city of Dongyang. We are again stopped by police outside Dongyang - but this time it is a speeding ticket, not detention for reporting on the riot.
Huaxi became famous among local activists in China, one of the first of many disturbances as rampant industrialisation led to clashes between the authorities and those left behind by development - the farmers and migrant workers who make up two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion population.
Gathered together in the home of one of the jailed villagers, Liu's 58-year-old father, Liu Rongtian, is a model of politeness, passing around tea, cigarettes and fruit.
"For us, nothing is over," says Ms Si. Like all the families of those jailed in January, she insists that her husband is innocent. They have a six-year-old son, Liu Yujie, and she is worried about what will become of him.
"This September he starts primary school, and already the other children have begun to tease him that his father is a criminal. Their parents all know he is innocent, but children can be cruel," she said.
Ms Si is baffled as to why her husband was given such a heavy sentence. She believes it may be because he was the first to be detained on April 19th.
Everyone protests their innocence and wonders how they were singled out for arrest. Those who have been released show scarred wrists and tell of injuries to their backs, their feet and ankles and describe months of torture in police custody.
Jiang Yonggen, who like many in Huaxi has a plastics recycling business at home, says he was regularly deprived of sleep and food, and was beaten by other prisoners in the police station at Dongyang.
He was forced to do the "airplane" - his back still hurts from the terrible ordeal of having his body suspended from his wrists, which were tied behind his back. "I did not want to live any more," he says. The police deny the charge of torture.
One person, Wang Xinwang, who turned government witness, was acquitted. He is despised now for "grassing" on the men, including Liu Huirong.
The story is a classic example of how China's booming economy, as well as lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, has also generated social unrest.
Last year 87,000 serious disturbances to public order were recorded, a rise of almost 7 per cent.
The ruling Communist Party is alarmed by the wave of rural anger sparked by loss of land and complaints of inadequate compensation.
There are more than 800 million farmers and other residents of rural China, earning less than €1 a day. Their average annual income is about €325, which is less than one-third of what people earn in the cities.
The situation is getting so serious that the government has made the growing rural/urban divide in China one of the focal points of the annual parliament, the National People's Congress, which begins on Sunday.
The causes are always the same: villagers and farmers outraged at land grabs; migrant workers who have not received pay for many months, sometimes years; and workers, laid off as a result of privatisation programmes at state-owned companies, who want some kind of social welfare.
Wang Xiaofan, whose brother Wang Liangping was jailed for rioting, is worried that the factories might be back. "We do not trust them not to put the factories back in. We have been cheated by the government for so long," says Ms Wang.
In a sign of just how sensitive the Huaxi rioting became, the Zhejiang provincial government took the rare step of punishing eight officials from Dongyang and Huaxi in December for failing to "preserve social harmony".
Wang Tianjun was given less than €10 for his farm, making him one of anything up to 70 million farmers who have been dispossessed. Almost 200,000 hectares of farmland is disappearing every year through expansion of cities and industrialisation.
The farmers are planning a landmark legal action to try to recover their land, but legal experts say they are unlikely to win anything back, even if the government does do something to reform the way in which land is bought and sold in China at the NPC next week.
The NPC is a largely ceremonial event to celebrate the triumph of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Very much a throwback to the cold war era, it takes place in the Great Hall of the People, a massive room bedecked with red flags and ringing with Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.
While the NPC never throws up surprises, it is more than just a talking shop, as it provides a platform for many important public decisions taken by the Communist Party.
Votes are almost always unanimous and delegates express their approval by applauding loudly and often.
The rural/urban divide will feature prominently at the congress.
Last week, China launched a plan aimed at narrowing the potentially destabilising income gap between rural and urban China, building what Beijing calls a "new socialist countryside".
It is pledging billions in funding and tax relief to help farmers.