Popular Protests in China: Rights and Resistance
Jiali Li writes:
The 1989 Tiananmen crisis has led to a strong consensus among scholars that the resilience of the authoritarian regime in the PRC is approaching its limits. However, there has been no nation-wide riot that could demonstrate a potential breakthrough moment. In fact, the post-1989 popular protests and riots have experienced several stages of change, from organized opposition by the mass unemployed population to industrial privatization, to small scale protests targeting the local governments. These protests have resulted in increasing rights awareness and more strategic resistance, which enhanced the role of civil society.
In 2009, the Chinese government introduced the concept of “mass incidents” (群体性事件) in replacement of the use of the word “riots” in official media. Mass incidents are defined by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as “planned or impromptu gathering that forms because of internal contradictions, including but not limited to public speeches, demonstrations, physical clashes, public airings of grievances and other group behaviors that are seen as disrupting social stability.” According to the 2012 China Society Yearbook, there were at least 180,000 mass incidents taking place in 19 Provinces in China, with almost half of it regarding land ownership disputes among the local government, property developers and the land owners. Approximately 35% of the protests were caused by labor rights disputes or environmental issues. Despite the high frequency, amongst all only about 3,000 cases involve more than 100 protesters and about 95% of all the protests ended within a week.
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Although most of the protests are of small scale, they share a lot of similarities and can usually be grouped under a same category as they target the local implementation of the same central government policy. For example, the land ownership disputes in rural China in the recent three years were all caused by the compulsory land acquisition for urbanization. Local authorities in China, in their pursuit of revenue via aggressive urbanization and industrialization, are also undermining the country’s grassroots democracy. It was usually local officials who carried out difficult negotiations with villagers or village collectives, or who were in charge of coercing defiant farmers to accept government terms.
By studying the rhetoric used by protesters in China when addressing their issues to the public, the rightful resisters distinguish between a benevolent central government and predatory grassroots cadres. It appears that the local authorities are often accused of ineffectively implementing a policy from the central government while the policy itself is considered justified and beneficial by the villagers. However, it also seems obvious that these problems could have been easily anticipated at the stage of policy making. So it is questionable if the central government should not be blamed at all for these misconducts.
Even if the central government is not the main cause of these disputes, it is actively involved in oppressing the protesters. The Ministry of Public Security has set up an office named “Public Order Administration” early this century and it spent 701.8 Billion Yuan (about 111.4 Billion USD) in 2011 to fund all the public order administration missions (维稳/Wei wen), exceeded the national defense spending for the first time. Interestingly, the responsibility of putting down protests and riots is delegated to the local authorities. But with the huge amount of funding, the local police are now better funded, more technologically advanced, and more skillful in the arts of repression than ever.
The government needs to begin taking the underlying causes of mass incidents seriously and address ongoing concerns that lead to protests and sometimes violence. Rapid economic development has helped millions, but created broad inequities and other problems. Reform is needed to ease the tension between the people and the local authorities. And there is a fair amount of expectation from the Chinese Academics to the new leader of Chinese government, Xi Jingping, as he claimed himself a reformer at the beginning of his administration, something former Chinese Presidents have never done.
Links:
Great Expectations
China boosts domestic security spending by 11.5 pct
Protest Leadership in Rural China
The Wukan Uprising ant Chinese State-Society Relations: Toward “Shadow Civil Society”?
There’s a point in your post that I would like to ask about. When you mention that “Rapid economic development has helped millions, but created broad inequities and other problems”, are you referring to economic growth or economic development?
For some reason,some people use both terms interchangeably when it should not be the case.
Quoting Dr.Joshua Farley in an interview with Almantas Samalavicius,” Growth is a quantitative increase in the production of goods and services, while development is a qualitative improvement in the economy” [1].
Although China has had an amazing economic performance and growth the past decade, income inequalities and other sort of inequities have been exacerbated in some regions. It is important to note that China has a very large population which makes it much harder to achieve this goal;however, it is important to start a plan soon, to tackle the complexities of it and address a problem that would take several years to see results, before the gap keeps increasing and social unrest is inevitable [2].
Links:
[1]http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-30-farley-en.html
[2]http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/05/news/economy/china-income-inequality/index.html