Officials and armed police continued to patrol the village and tail family of the dead men on Friday, one villager said.

"They're treating us like enemies," said the villager, who gave his surname as Lin.

Senior provincial officials have visited the Honghaiwan power plant and said it must be completed on schedule by late 2006, according to a manager at the plant who refused to give her name.

On Sunday, Guangdong province's deputy secretary-general, Lin Ying, also visited the plant.

"He said that the provincial government fully supports construction of the Shanwei power generation project and will ensure that power plant construction accelerates under conditions of social stability," said a report on the Web site of the Guangdong Red Bay Generation Co., which is building the plant.

And three days after the shootings, Shanwei, the city that controls Dongzhou, announced a "framework agreement" for a much bigger and possibly contentious project -- a nuclear power plant.

"Our city will grasp this opportunity and apply all our energies ... to promote an early start to the nuclear project," said the mayor of Shanwei, Wang Menghui, according to a report on the city government Web site.

The nuclear power complex will be built by the state-owned Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co. and cover three sites -- the first one about 30 km (18 miles) from Dongzhou.

Beijing, struggling with power shortages that pose a threat to economic growth, has outlined an ambitious plan to build dozens of reactors over the next couple of decades and quadruple its nuclear power capacity by 2020.

Observers said that in Dongzhou and many parts of rural China the clash between projects to fuel growth and rural citizens increasingly embracing ideas of political rights is fuelling rising protest, even as China's leaders promise a more "harmonious society".

"A lot of these people are losing faith that the central leadership is behind them, so they feel they have to solve problems on their own," said Kevin O'Brien, an expert on Chinese rural protest at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It seems to me that protest is becoming more violent, more confrontational, and more organised," he said, noting that many rural protesters were also recruiting outside help from lawyers, activists and human rights organisations.

Two days after the bloody confrontation of Dec. 6, Shanwei's Communist Party chief, Rong Tiewen, told officials to make a priority of preserving social stability and preventing signs of protest, especially in Dongzhou.

"We must comprehensively monitor unstable elements," he told officials, according to a transcript on the Shanwei city government Web site.

He ordered officials to "tail, repatriate, and deal with" any protesters who try to leave villagers for the city, which is hosting a folk arts festival. "Dongzhou must be a focus," he said.

A relative of one of the three men who was shot said their families had all agreed to accept 200,000 yuan ($25,000) in compensation for their deaths.

"The condition was that we keep quiet about what happened," he said. He asked that his surname not be reported.

Since last year, China has seen protests involving many thousands of villagers against power projects in western China, as well as growing protests over land and pollution.

A senior police official said in August that China's officially reported "mass incidents" grew from 58,000 to 74,000 in the previous year.

But O'Brien said estimates of protest numbers were difficult to verify.

"The sheer number isn't as important as the fact that there's this emergence of rights consciousness, where people think of themselves as citizens, not subjects," he said.