Chinese Social Unrest - Local Crackdowns Backfiring

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Line of Defense - Beijing is worried about 'alarming' levels of social
unrest, but a policy of local crackdowns is backfiring.
By Melinda Liu / Newsweek International
[img]http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/Mag/051024_Issue/051015_OverseasChina_hsmall.widec.jpg[/img] [img]http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/08/26/PH2005082602079.jpg[/img]
Riot police on alert in Taishi, Guangdong

"Local goons show up very quickly these days," says lawyer and veteran
China-watcher Jerome Cohen, currently teaching in Beijing. He cites blind
activist Chen Guangcheng, who was assaulted by toughs after he exposed rural
Shandong authorities for illegally forcing women to have abortions if they
had kids above the official "quota." Chen remains a virtual prisoner, his
home surrounded by thugs.

Oct. 24, 2005 issue - In the '90s, the Chongqing Special Steelworks was
touted as a modern state-run enterprise, with fat profits and grand plans to
expand. In fact, its managers were cooking the books to feign profitability.
They couldn't pay back loans�or, eventually, the workers' salaries. After
the company declared bankruptcy in July, its 15,000 workers began
protesting. Some hung white banners�and a 1970s Chairman Mao portrait�out in
public, demanding new jobs. On Oct. 7, more than 4,000 workers and relatives
converged near the plant, blocking traffic. When more than 100 police pulled
up, a melee erupted. Cops and unidentified civilians waded into the crowd
swinging electric cattle prods. "Three protesters died, and more than 30
were wounded," one jittery eyewitness told NEWSWEEK last week, requesting
anonymity because he feared for his safety. Another began weeping when she
recalled the bloodshed, motioning at dozens of Chinese riot police who
continued to mill about the protest site last week, days after the
confrontation.

At last week's Communist Party Central Committee meeting in Beijing,
President Hu Jintao and his comrades approved a new economic plan that
listed as its chief goal building a "harmonious society." They'd better get
to work, because China is anything but harmonious these days. Protests of
varying size and intensity erupt almost daily throughout the country.
Because the demonstrations are scattered and isolated, these social squalls
aren't a serious threat to the regime. Still, authorities acknowledge that
unrest has reached "alarming" levels. Not long ago, the mainland's top cop,
Zhou Yongkang, said that 74,000 major protests took place last year, up from
58,000 in 2003. More than 3.7 million people took to the streets in
2004�angry about such issues as official corruption, health problems,
environmental degradation, mistreatment by employers and home evictions.
Little wonder that Zhou named "actively preventing and properly handling"
such incidents as his main task this year.

In a broad sense, the protests are the dark side of the country's economic
miracle. Pell-mell economic growth has boosted incomes for hundreds of
millions of people, but it's also physically disrupted life in the
countryside and left millions more feeling left out of the prosperity boom.
Wages in cities are three times greater than in rural areas. According to
the U.N. Development Program, China now has one of the worst so-called Gini
coefficients in the world�a quantitative measure of economic inequality.
China's Gini coefficient is .45, and experts say that any number above .4 is
likely to trigger social upheaval. That is precisely what's happening in
rural China and high-unemployment industrial regions like the northeast
(accompanying story), where citizens are seething with discontent. "Never
before in human history has so much change happened for so many people in
such a short time," says entrepreneur James McGregor, author of a new book
titled "One Billion Customers."

At last week's Central Committee meeting, the Communist Party leadership
vowed to bridge the income gap and take better care of the environment as
the nation roars ahead. Beijing's strategy for placating the discontented
isn't quite so progressive, however. The government has simply ordered local
authorities to clamp down, and many are doing so�violently. Minxin Pei, of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says that the
Public Security Ministry has threatened to fire local police if
demonstrators are spotted on the streets. Moreover, Zhou has warned local
authorities that democracy activists might try to co-opt local gatherings
and weld them into a larger anti-party movement. That's why the government
has recently cracked down on NGOs, tightened controls on the conventional
news media and closed down cutting-edge Internet chat rooms and Web sites.

But Beijing's plan may be backfiring. More and more, local officials are
turning to harsh tactics to keep people in check. Many �are hiring "black
societies"�local thugs�to keep a lid on protests. In two separate incidents
in October alone, local goons roughed up three foreign correspondents when
they tried to report on unrest in Guangdong's Taishi village, where in July
locals began a legal signature-gathering campaign to recall the elected
mayor. Many in the village have accused him of incompetence and corruption,
the latter related to a lucrative real-estate deal. (The mayor, still in
office, says "they're lying.") This month in Taishi, Beijing lawyer Guo
Feixiong was arrested, and a political activist was beaten.

The repression of activists and journalists is beginning to make China, or
parts of it, seem like a mafia state. Last Thursday a Chinese cameraman in
Tianjin, who was filming a demonstration for a European TV network, was
pulled out of a car and assaulted by toughs in civilian clothes. (The
beating took place outside the office of Tianjin's mayor, whom the group had
just finished interviewing.) "Local goons show up very quickly these days,"
says lawyer and veteran China-watcher Jerome Cohen, currently teaching in
Beijing. He cites blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who was assaulted by
toughs after he exposed rural Shandong authorities for illegally forcing
women to have abortions if they had kids above the official "quota." Chen
remains a virtual prisoner, his home surrounded by thugs.

Beijing's embrace of capitalism has demolished many state and corporate
subsidies, making a shambles of everything from pension schemes to
health-care systems to school fees. The income gap is now a chasm. Of
China's 1.3 billion people, the most affluent fifth earns half of total
income, according to one official study, while the bottom fifth takes home a
piddling 4.7 percent. Increasingly, those at the bottom realize that the
system itself must change if they are to break out of the trap of poverty.
In contrast to earlier protests, therefore, more and more demonstrations now
seek to boost social justice more broadly�pushing for democratization, rule
of law, and citizens' rights to a healthy environment.

The tense Taishi stalemate, for instance, could influence the very
development of grass-roots democracy in China. Last month Prime Minister Wen
Jiabao told visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "if Chinese can
manage a village, I believe in several years they can manage a township." At
the moment, directly elected officials govern Chinese villages only, not the
larger townships where leaders are normally appointed.

So political activists saw an iconic struggle brewing when residents of
Taishi (population: 2,000) began a legal campaign to oust the mayor, Chen
Jinsheng. Taishi residents collected enough signatures for a recall. But in
early August, after discovering an apparent attempt to burgle the village's
accounting books, they took up a vigil to guard the records. Things got ugly
Aug. 16, when hundreds of police and local thugs clashed with protesters. In
early September, 16 hunger-strikers from the village were detained. More
violence erupted shortly afterward, when some 1,000 cops took possession of
Taishi's accounting books and fired water cannons at protesters, many of
them elderly. On Oct. 7 local thugs punched and jostled the China-based
correspondents for Radio France International and the South China Morning
Post when the reporters arrived in Taishi to report on the ongoing protest.

The following day, The Guardian's Shanghai reporter Benjamin Joffe-Walt
traveled to Taishi with Lu Banglie, 35, who'd been briefly detained in
Taishi once already. When a gang of village toughs saw Lu, they pulled him
out of the car and beat him brutally, according to four eyewitnesses who
believed the attackers belonged to local mafia, known as hei shehui, or
black societies. The beating triggered a wave of international press
coverage and concern�raising Chinese activists' hopes that
central-government authorities would take notice of the repressive tactics
at last. "Now there's huge internation�al pressure," says Hou Wenzhuo of the
Empowerment and Rights Institute in Beijing. "This can't be covered up
easily the way it was before."

It's possible that Beijing will step in to resolve the Taishi mess. As
recently as Sept. 14, the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily ran a
commentary that was remarkably sympathetic to the villagers. They felt it
was tantamount to central-government blessing for their recall campaign. "No
matter who is right or wrong... there's one comforting point in that these
rural villagers know how to use legal procedures to recall an unpopular
village official," the newspaper said, pointing out Taishi's "signs of a
democratic environment built upon rationality and legality." Says Hou, "I
hope this is a turning point. Maybe the central government will intervene.
Then maybe the detainees will be released."

In fact, Hu and Wen are still consolidating power. Behind the scenes,
they're trying to push back some of the robber-baron tactics of their
predecessors and do more for rural residents. Last year, for example,
Beijing eliminated all agricultural taxes. The "Shanghai faction" close to
ex-president Jiang Zemin is now more identified with unscrupulous
real-estate tycoons in cahoots with crooked authorities, all of them
obsessed with big business and big profits. "The current government pays
greater attention to the concerns of the weaker sector [of society]," says
Prof. Zuo Dapei, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "The former
government didn't care."

James McGregor, the author and former journalist who worked in China for two
decades, agrees. He says that in the 1980s and 1990s, the mainland's
commissars "were like trickle-down Republicans." They concentrated on
pushing growth and rewarding cronies�and "what went by the wayside was
health care, social services and the like." He views Hu and Wen as "more
like Social Democrats," adding: "If they don't [stand up for the underclass]
they'll be run out of power."

They'll need more than cosmetic gestures to do so, though. Zuo blames
yawning inequality in the cities on the privatization of state firms and
warns that massive layoffs are likely to lead to social disturbances "just
like the former Soviet Union." That looks to be the case at the Chongqing
Special Steelworks. Neither the government nor the company that bought bits
of the old plant feel responsible for the steelworkers, an official from the
municipality's Economic and Trade Commission told NEWSWEEK. "No one wants to
take the burden." Some 3,000 have been laid off in the past two years.
Another 15,000 still get $15 monthly stipends but are all over 40, without
specialized skills, and therefore pretty much unemployable. The official
says, "This problem isn't going away any time soon." At least on that point,
Chongqing's angry steelworkers would agree.

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