(Adds taxi driver strike, paragraphs 11,12)

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Workers at a diesel engine factory in eastern China were in talks with local officials on Tuesday after days of protests over job security at the troubled plant, as a slowing economy stokes growing unrest.

Labour protests have hit struggling businesses in southern China in recent weeks, prompting fears that faltering economic growth due to the global financial crisis could stir wider popular unrest.

So far protests have been isolated and focused on particular businesses, though incidents of labour unrest in China have been on the rise in China over the past few years, with workers increasingly unafraid to take to the streets.

"It's not like it started with this recession. This recession just intensified it, it's going to increase it, and emphasise certain dimensions of it. But this is quite a long-term problem," said Bob Broadfoot, managing director of Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd.

"Part of it reflects growing frustration, with widening income disparities between different groups, and you have, because of reforms involving real estate, large numbers of demonstrations on how land has been used by local officials," he added.

Many of the 2,000 workers at the Yangdong Co Ltd diesel plant in Jiangyan city, Jiangsu province, had blocked local highways, surrounded government offices and yelled chants of "Save our jobs", said local resident Yu Changjiang.

"They went to the city government yesterday to demand action on the company, and I think the city officials are talking to them today, too," Yu said by telephone.

A police officer also said local officials had sought to defuse the dispute, apparently centred on the fate of company assets, but he denied a report that a senior Yangdong executive, Wang Jianming, had been kidnapped by workers.

One worker contacted in the Yangdong plant detailed complaints of the kind that appear to have growing numbers of Chinese workers angry at both their bosses and officials.

"The main problem with the factory is poor returns, and old-age pensions that are owed have not been given out," said the female employee, who refused to give her name citing fear of official punishment for talking to reporters.

Meanwhile in Sanya, on the tourist island province of Hainan, a strike by taxi drivers complaining about high rental fees and competition from unlicensed taxis continued, with more than 100 people gathering outside a government building, Xinhua news agency said.

Police have detained 21 people who "reportedly attacked taxi drivers who would not participate in the strike and smashed 15 cabs", the report paraphrased an unnamed police spokesman as saying.

Last month, hundreds of people rallied on the streets of a city in the once booming southern Chinese province of Guangdong demanding unpaid wages from a shuttered toy maker which had fallen victim to global economic woes.

Protests and incidents of "mass unrest" have risen in China in past years, sparked by grievances spanning official abuse of power and corruption, seizures of land, and disputes over environmental and corporate issues. But Beijing has not released statistics on protests for the past few years.

China's top police official has urged officers to avoid inflaming protests at a time of growing and increasingly complex social unrest. (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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