Chinese village goes to the polls to elect new leaders after running authorities out of town over land grabs

Chinese villagers in Wukan who staged a rebellion against local officials they accused of stealing their farmland voted for new leaders on Saturday in a much-watched poll that reformers hope will set a standard for resolving similar widespread and protracted disputes.

The Wukan protests flared in late 2011, with villagers smashing a police station and cars. After key village activists were detained in December, villagers drove out officials and barricaded themselves in for 10 days, keeping police out and holding boisterous rallies. Villagers said the local head, in power for decades, sold their farmland to developers without their consent.

There are tens of thousands of protests in China each year – many of them over land as in Wukan, and often provoked by the actions of indifferent or corrupt local officials.

Similar standoffs in China often end in arrests, but in Wukan the provincial government conceded. It offered to hold the new elections, return some of the disputed farmland and release the detained activists, as well as the body of one who died in detention.

China has allowed village elections for nearly three decades but local Communist party leaders, who hold the real power, often try to manipulate the results. By those standards Wukan is conducting what seems to be one of China's most free polls.

Huang Jinqi was among the several thousand people in the small fishing village in southern Guangdong province to fill in a ballot for the seven-member village committee. The 63-year-old farmer said the process was going smoothly and he was satisfied with how it had been organised. "It is open and transparent," he said.

Li Lianjiang, an expert on China's local elections and protests at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: "Hopefully local authorities in other places of Guangdong and even other provinces will refer to Wukan as a precedent when they face similar situations."

The election is being hailed by more liberal Chinese state media and democratic campaigners as the "Wukan model", a systematic approach in which the government uncharacteristically puts the interests of locals ahead of its usual emphasis on maintaining order. Wang Yang, Guangdong's party secretary who has a reputation as a reformer, said Wukan showed that a balance could be struck between "preserving stability and preserving rights".

Many experts said it was far too soon to say if political leaders would summon the will to replicate Wukan's lessons elsewhere.

"Wukan so far is an exceptional case," said Li Fan, who runs a private thinktank in Beijing that has been involved in local government experiments. "In this case, no matter how well the Wukan village elections proceed the impact on the development of grass-roots democracy is very limited."

The fact that many of the activists in Wukan's revolt ran for membership in the village committee is a precedent. To defuse protests local governments often make concessions, then arrest ringleaders when tempers have subsided, a practice known as "settling accounts after the harvest".