Residents of a small village in China went to the polls Saturday in a leadership election being hailed as a milestone for those demanding more say in the running of the one-party state.

Although village elections are common in China's rural areas, candidates are typically put forward by authorities and often run unopposed, unlike the poll in Wukan, in which 21 contenders are standing for a seven-person committee.

The democratic vote for the committee governing Wukan is going ahead with official approval after a long campaign by local people to end what they say is years of corrupt rule by Communist Party officials.

The vote comes months after residents of Wukan, in the southern province of Guangdong, rose up against authorities in a bold revolt, driving out the local officials they said had been stealing their land for years.

After a tense stand-off with police in December that lasted over a week, authorities in Guangdong, which borders China's semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong, granted villagers rare concessions, including pledges to hold free polls.

China has experienced breakneck growth since first opening its economy in the late 1970s and the government has struggled to balance its autocratic rule with the aspirations of its increasingly wealthy middle class.

Last year's uprisings in the Arab world were followed by a crackdown in China that saw calls for democratic change snuffed out and dissidents detained.

In small numbers at first, Wukan's villagers filled out paper ballots in makeshift wooden booths on the playground of a local school before placing them in a metal ballot box to cast their choices.

"They've given us a democratic election, I'm so happy," villager Zhang Bingchang, 45, told AFP as he waited to vote.

Villagers in China are by law allowed to vote for a committee to represent them, but many complain of fraud and lack of competition in polls that are often manipulated.

In Wukan's case, local leaders had held power for more than 40 years without being challenged, and residents say the leaders never allowed village polls to go ahead openly, instead selecting members behind closed doors.

"They were the local emperors. If they wanted to do something, they did it," said Zhang Jiancheng, 26, one of the candidates.

"They didn't care. They were corrupt and led a life of debauchery," he added, accusing the former leaders of selling off villagers' land to get rich while most residents struggled to make a living.

But after their unexpectedly successful revolt -- triggered when community leader Xue Jinbo died in police custody following months of tensions over land grab grievances -- Wukan villagers are sampling democracy for the first time.

Last month, they kicked off the voting process by openly selecting an independent election committee to oversee the poll, and then by picking 107 representatives to put forward candidates and field any complaints.

Organisers have also put in place a system of proxy votes for the many villagers who are working in other parts of the country.

Saturday's elections took place under the watchful eye of local authorities. Police officers stood outside the school where the polls were taking place with several police vehicles parked nearby.

The election has created a stir in China, and petitioners from other parts of the country have travelled to the village to try to take advantage of the media buzz to highlight their own grievances.

The events have not received widespread media coverage in China, although they are being reported by the state-run Xinhua news agency, other newspapers and on microblogs -- or weibo in Chinese.

"Wukan village has written the first page for China's 'post-modern' history... Let's welcome this historic progress," one netizen wrote on Sina's popular weibo.