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Monday 20 June 2011
Spilling over
The recent spate of violent protests across the mainland suggests that Beijing’s effort to keep a lid on social frustrations is failing. Instead, it must rethink its focus on economic growth and repression.
The recent spate of violent protests across the mainland suggests that Beijing’s effort to keep a lid on social frustrations is failing. Instead, it must rethink its focus on economic growth and repression.
Minxin Pei 20 June 2011
Something odd is happening in China. The country is arguably experiencing the most intense and violent social unrest in recent years despite the sunusually repressive measures imposed by Beijing since the “jasmine revolution” to maintain political stability.
In an incident eerily reminiscent of the spark that set off the “jasmine revolution” in Tunisia, last week in Zengcheng , a township in Guangdong, news that members of China’s much-reviled urban management bureau mistreated a 20-year-old pregnant migrant street vendor ignited an ugly riot. Thousands of enraged protesters set fire to government buildings and fought riot police with bricks and bottles. The authorities had to dispatch hundreds of riot police to restore order.
This incident happened on the heels of several highly publicised and equally disturbing protests. On June 9, in the city of Lichuan in Hubei province, the death in police custody of a local legislator known for his anti-corruption crusade sent thousands of protesters into the street, attacking local government buildings and clashing with anti-riot police. At the end of May, thousands of Mongolian college students demonstrated after a Mongolian herder was killed by a Han Chinese coal truck driver. Around the same time, a 52-year-old man in Jiangxi , driven to despair after local authorities decided to demolish his house, became a Chinese version of the suicide bomber when he exploded three homemade bombs outside local government buildings - killing himself and two other people.
Of course, riots and protests occur in China routinely. Although the government has stopped releasing official numbers on such disturbances, leaked official data cited by the Western press shows that 127,000 mass incidents took place in 2008. What makes the most recent mass incidents noteworthy is both their varied causes and the apparent ineffectiveness of Beijing’s sustained and costly campaign of maintaining social peace.
In the case of the Zengcheng incident, the cause of the riot was abusive treatment of ordinary citizens (in this case, discriminated migrant labourers) by low-level government employees. In Lichuan, it was corruption and police brutality. In Inner Mongolia, it was ethnic strife and environmental degradation. In Fuzhou , Jiangxi, it was forced eviction and demolition, a common scourge that has enriched local governments and developers but victimised millions of ordinary people.
What this list suggests is that the causes of social unrest in China are systemic - ordinary citizens are driven to desperate and violent protests because of the lack of the rule of law and the pervasive abuse of power by officials, often in pursuit of the policy objectives mandated by the Chinese government.
The connection between social unrest and the lack of rule of law on the mainland is self-evident. Had Chinese courts been empowered to curb the abuse of power by local governments, it is highly likely that aggrieved citizens would opt for judicial remedies, not high-risk violent confrontations with the authorities. In this regard, a comparison with India is instructive. Both China and India are experiencing wrenching social dislocations as a result of rapid modernisation. But the kind of state-society conflict, manifested in hundreds of clashes between ordinary citizens and local authorities in China daily, is exceedingly rare in India, which has a far more robust legal system.
Another systemic cause of social unrest is the policy objectives mandated by Beijing. In China as well as in the West, there is a convenient myth of “the good emperor served by bad mandarins”. According to this myth, central government policies are credited with good intent while local officials carrying out such policies are blamed for egregious conduct. Opinion surveys in China often report a high degree of popularity of the central government and abysmal ratings of local officials.
Unfortunately, when we analyse why local officials are so abusive, it is not hard to find that they are implementing wrong-headed policies emanating from the central government. The clearest example here is the policy of achieving high gross domestic product growth at any cost. Local officials are evaluated on the basis of their performance in delivering economic growth even though this exclusive focus on growth results in forced demolitions, environmental degradation, poor social services, corruption and widespread social discontent.
With socio-economic inequality rising to an unprecedented level in Chinese history, the combination of wrong-headed policies at the centre and systemic abuse of power and corruption at the local level concocts a toxic brew of social instability. Addressing rising social unrest in China thus requires both genuine institutional reforms that curb the abuse of power by local officials, and policy adjustments at the top that will remove the incentives for local officials to misbehave.
Unhappily, such a two-pronged approach conflicts with Beijing’s three-pillared strategy for maintaining social stability: economic growth, repression and tactical flexibility.
At the macro level, Chinese leaders believe that only sustained economic growth will help them maintain social peace even though the means of achieving high growth are tearing Chinese society apart.
At the micro level, repression, coupled with tactical flexibility in responding to popular grievances (for instance, local officials are often punished for mishandling riots) has more or less put a lid on social unrest.
The incidents in the past month suggest that such a strategy has run its course. Beijing needs to adopt a new approach that addresses the institutional and policy causes of social unrest.
Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
2 comments:
Spilling over
The recent spate of violent protests across the mainland suggests that Beijing’s effort to keep a lid on social frustrations is failing. Instead, it must rethink its focus on economic growth and repression.
Minxin Pei
20 June 2011
Something odd is happening in China. The country is arguably experiencing the most intense and violent social unrest in recent years despite the sunusually repressive measures imposed by Beijing since the “jasmine revolution” to maintain political stability.
In an incident eerily reminiscent of the spark that set off the “jasmine revolution” in Tunisia, last week in Zengcheng , a township in Guangdong, news that members of China’s much-reviled urban management bureau mistreated a 20-year-old pregnant migrant street vendor ignited an ugly riot. Thousands of enraged protesters set fire to government buildings and fought riot police with bricks and bottles. The authorities had to dispatch hundreds of riot police to restore order.
This incident happened on the heels of several highly publicised and equally disturbing protests. On June 9, in the city of Lichuan in Hubei province, the death in police custody of a local legislator known for his anti-corruption crusade sent thousands of protesters into the street, attacking local government buildings and clashing with anti-riot police. At the end of May, thousands of Mongolian college students demonstrated after a Mongolian herder was killed by a Han Chinese coal truck driver. Around the same time, a 52-year-old man in Jiangxi , driven to despair after local authorities decided to demolish his house, became a Chinese version of the suicide bomber when he exploded three homemade bombs outside local government buildings - killing himself and two other people.
Of course, riots and protests occur in China routinely. Although the government has stopped releasing official numbers on such disturbances, leaked official data cited by the Western press shows that 127,000 mass incidents took place in 2008. What makes the most recent mass incidents noteworthy is both their varied causes and the apparent ineffectiveness of Beijing’s sustained and costly campaign of maintaining social peace.
In the case of the Zengcheng incident, the cause of the riot was abusive treatment of ordinary citizens (in this case, discriminated migrant labourers) by low-level government employees. In Lichuan, it was corruption and police brutality. In Inner Mongolia, it was ethnic strife and environmental degradation. In Fuzhou , Jiangxi, it was forced eviction and demolition, a common scourge that has enriched local governments and developers but victimised millions of ordinary people.
What this list suggests is that the causes of social unrest in China are systemic - ordinary citizens are driven to desperate and violent protests because of the lack of the rule of law and the pervasive abuse of power by officials, often in pursuit of the policy objectives mandated by the Chinese government.
The connection between social unrest and the lack of rule of law on the mainland is self-evident. Had Chinese courts been empowered to curb the abuse of power by local governments, it is highly likely that aggrieved citizens would opt for judicial remedies, not high-risk violent confrontations with the authorities. In this regard, a comparison with India is instructive. Both China and India are experiencing wrenching social dislocations as a result of rapid modernisation. But the kind of state-society conflict, manifested in hundreds of clashes between ordinary citizens and local authorities in China daily, is exceedingly rare in India, which has a far more robust legal system.
Another systemic cause of social unrest is the policy objectives mandated by Beijing. In China as well as in the West, there is a convenient myth of “the good emperor served by bad mandarins”. According to this myth, central government policies are credited with good intent while local officials carrying out such policies are blamed for egregious conduct. Opinion surveys in China often report a high degree of popularity of the central government and abysmal ratings of local officials.
Unfortunately, when we analyse why local officials are so abusive, it is not hard to find that they are implementing wrong-headed policies emanating from the central government. The clearest example here is the policy of achieving high gross domestic product growth at any cost. Local officials are evaluated on the basis of their performance in delivering economic growth even though this exclusive focus on growth results in forced demolitions, environmental degradation, poor social services, corruption and widespread social discontent.
With socio-economic inequality rising to an unprecedented level in Chinese history, the combination of wrong-headed policies at the centre and systemic abuse of power and corruption at the local level concocts a toxic brew of social instability. Addressing rising social unrest in China thus requires both genuine institutional reforms that curb the abuse of power by local officials, and policy adjustments at the top that will remove the incentives for local officials to misbehave.
Unhappily, such a two-pronged approach conflicts with Beijing’s three-pillared strategy for maintaining social stability: economic growth, repression and tactical flexibility.
At the macro level, Chinese leaders believe that only sustained economic growth will help them maintain social peace even though the means of achieving high growth are tearing Chinese society apart.
At the micro level, repression, coupled with tactical flexibility in responding to popular grievances (for instance, local officials are often punished for mishandling riots) has more or less put a lid on social unrest.
The incidents in the past month suggest that such a strategy has run its course. Beijing needs to adopt a new approach that addresses the institutional and policy causes of social unrest.
Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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