For Yu Shuiping and other Chinese military veterans, the country they served has yet to show its gratitude. Fed up with paltry pensions and benefits, they are taking to the streets, hoping to shame the government into recognizing what they say is its obligation to those who battled in harsh conditions along the country’s borders.
While largely peaceful, the sporadic protests amplify concerns over labor unrest and threaten to undermine rank-and-file support for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) campaign to modernize the world’s largest-standing military by attracting better qualified and more highly motivated soldiers.
“We support the party and the government, and we don’t oppose the party or hate society,” Yu said in a telephone interview from his home in Hunan Province. “We just want better treatment.”
Photo: AP
Yu has for years been petitioning the government for more benefits, although he declined to discuss the specifics of his efforts.
Human rights activist Huang Qi (黃琦), who tracks unrest in China, estimates that veterans have staged as many as 50 protests this year, highlighted by a demonstration last week outside the Chinese Ministry of National Defense in central Beijing, where such actions are extremely rare.
Surrounded by police and plain-clothes officers, about 1,000 veterans from across the country, many dressed in their old uniforms, sang and marched for hours before being taken away in buses.
Behind the heavy security response lies the specter of street action by laid-off workers that has long haunted China’s leaders, obsessed with preserving social stability at all costs.
Following a wave of worker protests in the early 2000s, China faces a new round of cuts in coal mines, steel mills and other state firms, throwing millions of workers on the scrapheap. Such veterans’ protests go back decades and are now facilitated by adept use of social media.
The government censors information about them and veterans are highly reluctant to discuss their plight with foreign media for fear of being accused of disloyalty.
However, thus far their actions have borne little fruit. According to most accounts, the central government’s response has been to fob them off on local authorities, who then fail to act on their complaints.
The authorities work to ensure some veterans are satisfied, thus keeping them from forming a united front, said Neil Diamant, a professor of Asian law and society at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
They also arrest emerging veterans’ leaders, infiltrate the groups and monitor their communications, detaining large numbers if necessary, he said.
“So far, this has allowed them to muddle though. My guess is that they just wait them out, hoping that age will eventually prevent many from becoming overly feisty,” Diamant said.
Veterans also lack high-level contacts or powerful advocates, while the wars they fought in have never been particularly popular.
Their status in society does not come close to matching the prestige the Chinese Communist Party bestows on them, and most Chinese are more likely to sympathize with causes such as pollution and corruption that affect their daily lives.
Their appearances outside government offices are met with a firm although non-confrontational response from the security forces, which in Beijing tend to load them onto buses and drive them to the outskirts of the city where they are detained until agents from their local governments arrive to take them home.
“Having served in the army and taken part in war, we hope only that the government not treat us harshly,” Yu said, adding that he did not take part in the recent protest in Beijing.
For the military, the immediate priority is finding work for the 300,000 soldiers being cut under an order issued last year by Xi. While demobilized soldiers used to be given jobs in state companies, that possibility no longer exists, and with a slowing economy and tightening job market, there is no certainty that the private sector will be able to absorb them in such numbers.
While reemployment poses its own challenges, for older veterans such as Yu, pensions and benefits are the main concern.
Despite operating the world’s largest standing army, with 2.3 million personnel, China does not have a central government body to handle veterans’ affairs, such as the US Veteran’s Administration. Instead, cash-strapped local government offices are responsible for their welfare, and treatment varies widely across the country.
While the government requires that their incomes be marginally higher than the average in their home regions, that is often not the case, especially in the countryside where most veterans live, and are provided as little as 400 yuan (US$59.36) per month, according to Yu.
Urban dwellers suffer from a huge disparity depending on where they live, ranging from a token amount to something closer to the local average income, he said.
Given the lack of centralized information, it is difficult to tell how many veterans are now receiving pensions, including those who fought in the 1950-1953 Korean War, the 1962 border war with India and the 1979 invasion of Vietnam. The localized and scatter-shot nature of the system also precludes any unified figure on what the government spends on veterans.
Meanwhile, China’s fast-growing defense budget hit US$146 billion this year, making it the world’s second-largest after the US.
In the military’s quest for excellence, shoddy treatment of veterans could harm efforts to attract the best recruits.
That is part of the reason protesting veterans are not harshly treated, said Gao Wenqian (高文謙), senior policy adviser for Human Rights in China, which has been monitoring the protests.
“Stable morale among the military is one of [Xi’s] biggest concerns,” he said.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS