From afar, the huge banners draped across the village square of Wukan on Saturday seemed to herald a town fête. When a man stood up on a scooter to straighten a 20ft banner, however, its message suggested the inhabitants were under siege: “If all the farmland is sold, we will be slaves, losing our village.”

With his action, it was as if a curtain had lifted in a theatre. The square suddenly came to life, with scores of residents clamouring about a recent seizure of village land for an industrial park and other projects. “The hills have been sold, the sea has been sold, the land has been sold,” a middle-aged man said. “We have no land to plough.”

Variations of this complaint are heard repeatedly across China as arbitrary land acquisition by government officials provokes violent protests by villagers and sometimes city residents. But the protests and brutal police retaliation last week in Wukan in the southern province of Guangdong are a particular embarrassment for Wang Yang, Guangdong’s liberal Communist party secretary.