The last annualized figure for labor protests that the Chinese state was willing to announce publicly was 100,000 for the year 1999. But a 2001 internal report from the Ministry of Public Security disclosed that the num-bers "began a rise like a violent wind" from 1997, the year of the Communist Party's 15th Congress, which pressed for factory firings in the name of "efficiency."
While the government is determined to keep news of all disturbances out of the media -- or at least to downplay their size and disruptiveness -- it has nonetheless been possible to collect information on nearly 200 separate events between 1994 and last year from the many thousands of unreported events that actually took place. Some of these reports are from news sources in Hong Kong, a few are from Chinese publications and some come from the Western media.
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
These reports all exhibit a widespread increase of the same, unchanging pattern: the government, whether in Beijing or in the localities, generally tolerates the low-decibel, smaller-scale, relatively non-disruptive marches and sit-ins by peasants and workers with petitions or posters. It is especially indulgent if demonstrators appear to be spontaneous, disorganized, localized and leaderless.
The political elite is less tolerant of disturbances that seem to have been mobilized by dissidents, are marked by some measure of violence, evince a measure or organization, threaten to spread, or entail the obstruction of major transport trunk lines. Indeed, the few episodes that make it into the media beyond China usually involve such protests as railway lay-ins or blockages of major urban thoroughfares, assaults on and clashes with authorities, detentions and arrests.
What is sparking so much unrest in a country that is usually depicted as daily growing more affluent and which places such high emphasis on "stability?" The causes are: unpaid wages and pensions, sudden and massive job terminations, corrupt officials held responsible for the bankruptcy of some industrial enterprises and an end to most socialist privileges and benefits, guaranteed since the earliest days of the Communist regime in the 1950s.
Indeed, at the same time many Chinese are getting wealthier, job loss has led directly to impoverishment for approximately an eighth of many major cities' officially registered residents.
In the interest of undoing what post-Mao Zedong (
Having no really dependable channels for airing grievances, mobs of laid-off workers and people forced to "retire" (or xiagang, on partial pensions) have been increasingly challenging authorities over the past decade.
Doesn't this self-proclaimed "people's" government mind if so much of its urban populace is sinking into poverty and becoming disaffected? And why is this stability-obsessed regime allowing so much instability?
The truth is that while party leaders are terribly uneasy about the situation and discuss it frequently, there is a limit to what they can do within the confines of China's transition between systems.
The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) nearly constant invocation of the dangers of "social instability," and its tireless efforts to remain in power have forced them to confront the reality of these outbursts and the causes behind them with limited tools.
At the same time, these upheavals occur as a bitter humiliation for a Communist Party, which is supposed to represent the best interests of the proletariat.
Some of the party's response has been coldly coercive. But, there have also been compensatory efforts made that have preoccupied much of the energy of the labor, social security and of the civil affairs bureaucracies, which have been compelled to expend sizable emergency sums to calm unrest.
One serious effort was a "Reemployment Program" (beginning nationwide in 1998), which had the ambitious aim of somehow contriving a settlement of the laid-off state-sector workers.
The project was to provide a caretaker role by issuing basic livelihood allowances, medical insurance and pensions for workers while attempting to find new employment or preferential business terms to help them begin their own little ventures.
In fact, the central government allocated an impressive total of 77.9 billion yuan (US$9.41 billion) last year for laid-off workers and the poor, while localities also increased their outlays. But the sad truth is that probably only about a quarter of those pushed out of their plants ever got any meaningful support. Yet for those millions who have, this policy has managed to nip discontent in the bud before it grew.
As workers' consciousness of their rights increases, they are more and more apt to appeal their grievances to courts of law. Indeed from 1995 to 2001, the number of labor disputes adjudicated by the courts rose from 28,000 to 101,000.
Admittedly, workers have often found that arbitration has not helped them, owing to graft and the greater clout of the more powerful managers against whom they have filed suit. But legal redress has managed to turn the attention of at least some disaffected workers temporarily from the streets to mediation, and this has tended to reduce the number of confrontational street demonstrations.
Nonetheless, over the past few years, the numbers of urban protests in China have risen dramatically, and according to police reports, they are ever larger and better organized.
So far, the regime has succeeded in maintaining overall stability through control of the media (thereby preventing one protest movement from learning about and linking up with others); by buying off angry unemployed workers with temporary stipends and by suppressing and imprisoning those it cannot dissuade.
But these are temporary measures and when considered in tandem with the waves of peasant protest caused by arbitrary taxation, official corruption and wanton land confiscation, party leaders find themselves confronted with a deeply worrisome situation.
For what the party now confronts is a political threat no longer made up of students and intellectuals, as in 1989, but of workers and peasants, paradoxically the very disenfranchised classes on which Mao built his revolution and in whose name the CCP has ruled unilaterally for so long.
Dorothy Solinger is professor of political science and co-director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and a senior adjunct research scholar at Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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