Sunday 8 February 2009

Retired rural teachers a new source of unrest

They are old, angry and have mobile phones - and they worry the mainland’s protest-wary leaders.

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Guanyu said...

Retired rural teachers a new source of unrest

Reuters in Beijing
8 February 2009

They are old, angry and have mobile phones - and they worry the mainland’s protest-wary leaders.

Teachers across rural areas, many long retired or forced from classrooms, have joined a recent surge of protests, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, besieging local governments to demand better treatment and denounce official privilege.

Teachers in Xinning county, in Hunan province, signed a petition last week demanding wages, pensions and health care, and decrying the pay rises of government officials, one of the organisers, Xu Disu, said.

Mr. Xu, a retired primary school teacher in his late sixties, said hundreds had besieged the county government office in December.

“The officials promise to solve our problems but they never do, so we’ll keep petitioning and petitioning until they do,” he said. “I am old and I’m so angry. I’ll keep doing this until I pass away if they don’t listen.”

This rumble of teacher unrest in rural areas shows the strains on the ruling Communist Party as growth slows, employment shrinks and public rancour stirs. And all in a year when the party faces the 20th anniversary of the military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The teachers’ grievances festered for decades. But their reach and co-ordination have grown lately, as the internet and mobile phones have extended into once-isolated villages.

“Before it was teachers in one township joining up. But now they’re uniting across counties, cities and even provinces,” said Liu Feiyue, who runs a one-man rights advocacy office, Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, in Hubei. “The protests will continue in 2009, because the financial crisis gives the government more excuse to put off a solution.”

Grumpy teachers are part of a mosaic of local discontent unsettling officials. A Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report late last year said there were more than 80,000 protests, riots and other “mass incidents” in 2007, compared with more than 60,000 in 2006. Last year “did not allow for optimism”, it added. Nor does this year, many officials and experts say.

Mr. Liu estimated that there were more than 1,000 sit-ins and mass petitions that each mobilised hundreds or thousands of former rural teachers last year, a jump on previous years.

One sit-in in Shandong province in December drew about 4,000 to the provincial party headquarters, he said, and an earlier one in Shaanxi province attracted 2,000. These numbers are difficult to check, but pictures on Mr. Liu’s website (www.msguancha.com) showed hundreds of protesters in Shaanxi.

Recently, too, growing numbers of teachers have gone on strike for higher pay in dozens of places, including 6,000 in Loudi, Hunan, in December, according to Mr. Liu and other reports. But this wave of demonstrations, petitions and strikes also shows the limits of grassroots unrest, making it a distracting worry for leaders but far from a mortal threat.

While the mostly retired agitators rail at local officials, they proclaim loyalty to the Communist Party. And while their organisational strength has grown, their grievances and efforts remain mostly local. This is no revolution in the making.

“I don’t know what crime I committed,” said Zhu Jun, 61, a former teacher from Jiangsu province who said she was recently detained by police for leading protests there. “We only want national leaders to keep their promises. We only want a harmonious society,” she said, echoing one of President Hu Jintao’s phrases.

Most of the aggrieved teachers are in their 60s or older and poorly educated, and took up jobs as community teachers in the countryside in the Mao Zedong era, when there were very few fully-trained ones available.

From the 1980s, the mainland began to spend more money on rural schools but also demanded that teachers had proper qualifications.

Many who failed to scramble into the new hierarchy say they were abandoned without pensions, health care or dignity after giving their best years to poorly paid teaching. Many also say officials handed state-funded teaching jobs to kin and cronies, ignoring qualifications and seniority.

The ex-teachers said their anger with official privilege and corruption, as much as economic hardship, drove them to mobilise.

“We see all the corruption and how they [officials] make all the money, and that leaves us feeling out of balance,” said Chen Ming, 62, from Shandong, who said he was held by police for 10 days last month for helping to organise demonstrations and applying in Beijing to hold a protest march for 5,000 teachers.

Mr. Liu, the rights advocate, estimated that about 1 million teachers across a dozen provinces were forced out by the changes.