Shanghai, China – There is a growing uneasiness in the air in China, after months of increasingly bold protests rolling across the countryside.
For reasons that range from rampant industrial pollution to widespread evictions and land seizures by corrupt local governments in cahoots with increasingly powerful property developers, ordinary Chinese seem to be saying they are fed up and won’t take it any more.
Each week brings news of at least one or two incidents, with thousands of villagers in a pitched battle with the police, or bloody crackdowns in which hundreds of protesters are tear-gassed and clubbed during roundups by the police.
And by the government’s own official tally, hundreds of these events each week escape wider public attention altogether.
No one is ready to predict that this is the beginning of any great unraveling of an authoritarian state that has, over the past two decades, largely brought social peace and a reprieve from demands for political change by delivering breakneck economic growth.
But the response by the Chinese authorities, a mixture of alarm and seeming disarray, is a clear indication that whatever is brewing here is being taken with utmost seriousness at the summit of power.
Last week, for example, the government announced it was setting up special police units in 36 cities to put down riots and counter what the authorities say is the threat of terrorism.
With the exception of infrequent incidents involving Uighur separatists in the remote western region of Xinjiang, terrorism is all but unheard of in China. It would seem the authorities are most concerned about what Zhou Yongkang, the public security minister, told Reuters news agency last month were the 74,000 mass incidents, or demonstrations and riots, that occurred in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before, and only 10,000 a decade ago.
Other signs of mounting concern over this unrest are just as telling. This week, The Liberation Army Daily quoted a notice by the armed forces warning soldiers they would be “severely penalized” for taking part in petitions or demonstrations. The statement appeared to be prompted by a series of protests by veterans over their pension benefits at a People’s Liberation Army office in Beijing.
News of the anti-riot brigades coincided with an order to police chiefs nationwide to meet personally with “petitioners” lodging complaints about this or that issue. The order seems to be an attempt to nip localized discontent in the bud before it can turn into outright protest or disorder.
The entire campaign appears to have been kicked off with a strongly worded recent editorial, published in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, under the headline “Maintain Stability to Speed Development.”