Image caption Village came out in large numbers to protest after the death of their negotiator 
 
 Residents of a Chinese village locked in a stand-off over land seizures appear to be nearing a compromise with local authorities. 
 
 Protests have been simmering in Wukan, in Guangdong province, since September and escalated after the death of a village negotiator in police custody. 
 
 Villagers had planned a march through police barriers on Wednesday. 
 
 But a senior official met a village representative, and villagers said some demands had been met. 
 
 The villagers say officials have sold off their land to developers and failed to compensate them properly. 
 
 They also want an investigation into the death of Xue Jinbo, who died on 11 December while in the hands of local police. 
 
 Police say he died of a "sudden illness", but his family say he was beaten to death. 
 
 The villagers had planned to march through police barricades around the town to local government offices. Local authorities had urged them not to. 
 
 Amid deadlock, deputy provincial Communist Party secretary Zhu Mingguo agreed to meet local leaders on Wednesday in the town of Lufeng. 
 
 Image caption Police have set up roadblocks around the village 
 
 Village representative Lin Zulian said that the authorities had agreed to release three other village leaders detained at the same time as Mr Xue, and to release Mr Xue's body. 
 
 "I'm very satisfied with the outcome of the meeting," AFP news agency quoted him as saying. "This is not a victory, but it is a beginning." 
 
 Villagers have told the BBC they will return to the streets if promises are not kept. They later held a meeting to discuss the developments. 
 
 There are thousands of protests over land grabs in China each year but the situation in Wukan has attracted considerable attention because of its scale. 
 
 There has also been a series of strikes and labour walk-outs in southern China in recent months. 
 
 On Tuesday a separate protest erupted in Haimen, also in Guangdong province, over local government plans to build a power plant. ||||| Last year, there were as many as 180,000 outbursts of what sociologists here describe as “mass incidents”: strikes, sit-ins, rallies and violent clashes that have mushroomed alongside China’s breakneck economic expansion. Government figures from the mid-1990s put the number of such episodes at fewer than 10,000. 
 
 “People don’t have sufficient faith in legal procedures or the media and feel they have no redress when bad things are done to them,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who studies Chinese social trends. 
 
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 Some protests are prompted by worsening pollution, claims of unpaid wages or police brutality. A major source of unrest, including in Wukan, is the seizure of land by well-connected private developers or government officials, which involves forced evictions for meager compensation. 
 
 More than just unalloyed greed, these seizures are supported by local governments that have come to rely on proceeds of land sales and development to pay for day-to-day operations. 
 
 Reached by phone on Wednesday, residents of Wukan said throngs of people were staging a rally outside Wukan’s village hall while men with walkie-talkies used tree limbs to obstruct roads leading to the town. Not far away, heavily armed riot police officers were maintaining their own roadblocks. The siege has prevented some deliveries from reaching the town, but residents said they had managed to get supplies from nearby villages. 
 
 A top Communist Party official in Shanwei, whose jurisdiction includes Wukan, said that the allegations of illegal land seizure would be investigated but that villagers who played a role in organizing the clashes would be punished. Referring to Xue Jinbo, the 42-year-old representative who died, the acting mayor of Shanwei, Wu Zili, told reporters on Wednesday: “The death of Xue Jinbo was unlucky. But the family of Xue Jinbo is now calm.” 
 
 The discontent in Wukan has been simmering for more than a decade. Residents say land seizures began in the late 1990s, when officials began selling off farmland for industrial parks and apartment complexes. Villagers say more than 1,000 acres have been seized and resold to developers in the past decade or so. 
 
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 The residents’ ire exploded in September, when thousands of people took to the streets to protest the sale of a village-owned pig farm for luxury housing that netted the government $156 million. In addition to greater compensation and a public accounting about that deal and earlier ones, the residents called for democratic elections to replace village officials, including the party secretary, who has been in power since the early 1980s. After two days of demonstrations, during which police vehicles were destroyed and government buildings ransacked, the police moved in with what residents described as excessive brutality. 
 
 With order restored, county officials vowed to investigate the villagers’ claims. Two local party leaders were fired and the authorities made an offer that is rare in China’s top-down political system: county officials would negotiate with a group of village representatives chosen by popular consensus. 
 
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 Mr. Xue, a butcher, was among the 13 people selected. 
 
 It is unclear what happened next, but villagers say the good will evaporated this month after a Lufeng County government spokesman condemned the earlier protests as illegal and accused Wukan’s ad hoc leaders of abetting “overseas forces that want to sow divisions between the government and villagers.” A few days later, residents took to the streets again and staged a sit-in. Last Friday, the authorities responded by sending in a group of plainclothes police officers who grabbed five village representatives, including Mr. Xue. 
 
 Two days later, he was dead. 
 
 According to a 24-year-old villager who described himself as Mr. Xue’s son-in-law, Mr. Xue’s knees were bruised, his nostrils were caked with blood and his thumbs appeared to be broken. The man, who spoke by phone and gave his surname as Gao, declined to fully identify himself. “We’ve been to the funeral home a couple of times, but the police won’t release his body,” he said. 
 
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 The Daily Telegraph of London, which first reported on the most recent skirmishes, said villagers had stockpiled crude weapons, including steel-tipped bamboo spears. 
 
 Although government censors have largely blocked news of the latest unrest, the state-run Xinhua news agency weighed in on the “rumors” about Mr. Xue’s death, saying he had died of cardiac arrest a day after confessing to his role in the September uprising. His crimes were described as “damaging public property” and “disrupting public service.” 
 
 The account, published Tuesday, said that Mr. Xue had been interrogated over two days and that on the third day a cellmate found him ill. He was taken to a hospital in Shanwei and declared dead 30 minutes later. 
 
 The Xinhua article cited public security officials who said Mr. Xue had a history of asthma and heart disease, and it referred to a report by forensic investigators who found no evidence of abuse. “We assume the handcuffs left the marks on his wrists, and his knees were bruised slightly when he knelt,” Luo Bin, deputy chief of the Zhongshan University forensics medical center, told Xinhua. 
 
 The top party official in Shanwei, Zheng Yanxiong, said Mr. Xue’s death would nonetheless be investigated, but he warned residents against using their suspicions to fuel unrest. 
 
 “The government will strive to settle all related problems and hopes the village will not be instigated into staging further riots,” Mr. Zheng said. ||||| Southern Chinese authorities have given in to demands of protesting villagers after a nearly two-week standoff with police, releasing detainees and returning some confiscated land to farmers in a rare compromise. 
 
 Protest leader Yang Semao says a senior provincial official told him and another village representative in a meeting Wednesday that four villagers being held by police would be released over the next few days and land from one development project would be returned to the villagers. 
 
 Yang says police on Tuesday night withdrew and removed the roadblocks that they had set up leading into the village. 
 
 Wukan villagers angered by the sale of farmland without their consent drove out local officials and police almost two weeks ago.
– They fought the law and, for now, it looks like they won. Villagers in southern China who rebelled against the Communist Party over a land grab and the death of a village negotiator in police custody have had some of their demands met, AP reports. Authorities have agreed to release four detained villagers from Wukan and return confiscated land to farmers. The Communist Party's deputy chief in Guangdong province has agreed to meet with protest leaders, and, in return, villagers have agreed to postpone a planned march to government offices. Police officers had surrounded the Guangdong village of 20,000 people during the two-week standoff, but roadblocks have now been lifted. Thousands of protests against land grabs occur every year in China, but the one in Wukan attracted an unusual amount of attention both in China and abroad, the BBC notes.