The rash of such conflicts has become one of the chief symbols of rising inequality, both within cities and between urban and rural areas – a cause for ever greater disquiet among the leadership in Beijing. However, as Prof Jeff Wasserstrom of the University of California, Irvine, points out, the underlying cause of these protests differs from those behind Tiananmen Square.

“The protests in 1989 were, in a sense, about how to modernise the country,” he says. “Today they are more about the social costs of modernising so quickly.”

The race to repossess land usually has one of two motivations – to make way for new factories or to clear space for high-rise housing developments for sale to the urban middle class. Even when such compounds are built, different and more subtle forms of political pressure build up.