More than 100 people attacked police officers over the controversial death of a motorcyclist on Thursday in Huizhou City of south China's Guangdong Province, local authorities said on Friday.

The trouble lasted from early morning to 1 p.m. on Thursday. Police held seven people who led raids on a police station, the villagers' committee of Shangnan office and nearby shops in Yuanzhou Township, Boluo County, a spokesman for the Boluo County Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said.

He said a police wagon of the police station had been overturned.

He said riot police were dispatched to maintain order, but didn't reveal if there were any casualties from the attack.

The trouble was triggered by the disputed death of a motorcyclist surnamed Ouyang from central Hunan Province. The dead man had made money using his motorcycle to transport passengers in Boluo, the spokesman said.

The driver's family members claimed Ouyang was beaten to death by security guards of the Shangnan Village; local police, however, were told he had died from a traffic accident, he said.

The traffic police of Yuanzhou Township received an emergency call at about 4:27 a.m. on Thursday about a motorcyclist who had fallen from his vehicle and was injured near a gas station. They found him dead when they arrived at 4:40 a.m..

A 30-meter-long tire track was found on the ground, suggesting the motorcycle was traveling at a high speed when the accident happened. Police also found a dent in the driver's head, indicating a lethal blow.

After investigating the scene for an hour, the police decided to take the motorcycle back to the police station and send the dead man's body to a funeral home. They were stopped from doing so by Ouyang's friends.

His family members arrived at the site at about 7 a.m., believing Ouyang was beaten to death by the security guards of Shangnan Village. They demanded nobody move the body before the murderers are caught and punished.

More and more people started to gather at the site. Then, more than 100 people, including the victim's family members, hometown fellows and a number of others who had no knowledge of what actually happened, staged an attack, the county spokesman said.

Local authorities were investigating whether the death was by a traffic accident or a result of a beating by security guards as claimed by the victims' family members, the spokesman said.

They were also investigating whether Ouyang had conflicts with the security guards, whether he had been chased by them when the traffic accident happened, whether the guards charged "protection fees" from the driver and other issues, the spokesman said.

Currently, his body is in a funeral home in Boluo County, the spokesman said.

"At the request of family members, local police are waiting for the arrival of forensic doctors from their hometown of Hunan to conduct a postmortem examination and determine the real cause of death," he added.

The trouble happened almost three weeks after a violent protest in Weng'an County of the southwestern Guizhou Province. At the time, about 30,000 residents stormed police and government office buildings after rumors spread that police had covered up the rape and murder of a local teenage girl. Autopsies, however, revealed she had drowned.

Local officials admitted there were social grievances in Weng'an, citing the county authorities had failed to solve disputes over mines, demolition of homes for city building, relocation of residents for reservoir construction, reform of state-owned enterprises and other issues.

The central government recently ordered all CPC chiefs of 2,300 counties to act on people's complaints and try to resolve their disputes, the China Daily reported on Wednesday, citing the Outlook Weekly magazine.

The unprecedented public help campaign that started earlier this month was in response to recent public protests. It displayed the central leadership was paying more attention to public complaints after a rising number of social conflicts at the grassroots level, the paper said.