MCLC: southern street movement

Tue Oct 22 09:30:49 EDT 2013

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: southern street movement
***********************************************************

Source: China Change (1-/19/13):
http://chinachange.org/2013/10/19/the-southern-street-movement/

The Southern Street Movement
By China Change

In recent years, street banner protests have become an emerging phenomena
in China. We often see photos of petitioners rolling out banners to
protest injustice or forced demolitions. But prior to this year, when the
Chinese government launched a more severe crackdown in an attempt to put
an end to these activities, cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and others
had seen frequent street banner protests. Different from rights defense
demonstrations, these street protests called for government officials to
publicly disclose their finances and, more broadly, for democratic
freedoms. They are a form of direct, conscious political behavior.

37-year-old Wang Aizhong (王爱忠)attended  a university in Guangzhou in the
1990s and has since lived in the southern metropolis. He is a senior
manager for a company, and one of the earliest initiators of the Southern
Street Movement (南方街头运动). Mr. Wang recently told Radio France
Internationale (RFI) in a telephone interview: “At the beginning, around
August, 2011, we felt that we had only been staying online to voice our
opinions and expressed our concerns on various issues, and the actual
impact of online expression had been very small. Later, several people in
Guangzhou, including myself, Liu Yuandong (刘远东), Ou Longgui (欧龙贵) and
Yang 
Chong (杨崇), worked on the idea of ‘Moving from the Internet to the Public
Square.’ We initiated a monthly gathering at the Huanghuagang Memorial
Park (黄花岗烈士陵园) where we met on the last Sunday of each month at two
o’clock in the afternoon.  You could say that this was the start of the
Southern Street Movement. Pretty soon a dozen more people joined us,
including attorney Tang Jingling (唐荆陵) and Yuan Xiaohua (袁小华). Later
on, 
we not only had native Guangzhou participants, but also people from
Shenzhen, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Huizhou. Further along, we even had people
from neighboring Hunan and Guangxi provinces. As the number of
participants grew, it didn’t take long before the authorities cracked down
on us.”

Wang Aizhong said that the so-called Southern Street Movement is not an
organization. In its current state, the term merely refers to activities
related to making a political expression on the streets or in public
sphere, and because it emerged in the south, it has been called the
Southern Street Movement. In addition to the aforementioned ones,
participants include Zhang Shengyu (张圣雨), Sun Desheng (孙德胜), Jia Pin(贾
榀), 
Xu Lin(徐琳), Zhang Wanhe (张皖荷), Chen Jianxiong (陈剑雄), Huang Wenxun(黄
文勋) and 
Yuan Fengchu (袁奉初). There are a lot of them. They come from all walks of
life, including college graduates, businessmen, lawyers, laborers, the
unemployed, and the petitioners.

Yu Gang (余刚) was 20 years old when the June 4th Tiananmen democracy
movement took place in 1989.  He was a third-year college student and
participated in the demonstrations. He has been a businessman for years
and now lives in Shenzhen. In an interview this May, he told RFI, “In the
twenty years since the June 4, 1989, incident until 2009, I saw little
democratic progress in China. My friends and I wanted to take actions to
change China. Starting in 2010, we gradually took to the street to hold
demonstrations.”

In China, street demonstrations require courage and are often difficult to
initiate. It had a rough start and the mobilization didn’t go well either.
However, as Yu Gang and his friends persevered, their actions have
received more and more response and grown increasingly daring. They
include going downtown to publicly mobilize the people. “In 2010, we only
held one event,” says Yu Gang. “We went to the heart of the Shenzhen
downtown area to hold banner protests and give speeches. We demanded that
the Chinese government hold general elections to choose leaders and
abolish the ‘one-party’ political system. The entire demonstration lasted
only one and a half hours. In 2011, we held four demonstrations, all in
Guangzhou, demanding general elections, promoting World Human Rights Day,
and supporting Wukan’s fight against local corruption. In 2012, we took to
the streets seven or eight times, promoting democracy, criticizing the
government, or calling for asset disclosure by officials. This year we
have already held 40 demonstrations in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. During the
Southern Weekend Incident at the beginning of the year, we went out in
full gear, holding heated on-site demonstrations for three days in a row.”

As for why these street activities can emerge and flourish in cities like
Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Yu Gang’s explanation is that Guangdong, close to
Hong Kong,  has always been China’s frontier for openness, and people
enjoy relatively free thinking. “In the last 100 years of modern history,”
said Yu Gang, “Guangdong has been the frontrunner in leading China towards
a more westernized civilization. In their daily life, Guangdong people
have always discussed politics in bold ways, and are not as afraid as
people in the north.”

Wu Kuiming (吴魁明) is a lawyer who has been living in Guangzhou for more
than 20 years. He has represented many human rights cases, and has a
unique perspective of the street movement. He told RFI in a recent
interview: “the street movement participants are  mostly grassroots
laborers, very different from our generation of college students in ‘89.
They are non-locals who have come here to work. Most of them were born in
the 1970s or 1980s, and weren’t influenced by liberal ideas in the 1980s
as my generation had been. They entered adulthood in the 1990’s, a
relatively constrained and oppressed era. Their arousal of political and
civic consciousness was completely self-motivated. As the internet, Weibo,
and QQ messenger have made communications convenient, they have become
more confident, and were able to band together to flourish.”

In regards to the significance of the street movement, Mr. Wu gave
unambiguous affirmation. He even believes that the people participating in
the street movement are the driving force for reform. “In China’s current
environment,” he told RFI, “the government, the business community, and
the bureaucrats basically have no motivation to change. In every dynasty,
intellectuals and students are supposed to be the progressives of the
time, but when you look at China today, it’s no longer the case. Students
have been completely brainwashed and indoctrinated. Intellectuals and
social media opinion leaders (otherwise known as Big Vs) are more inclined
towards reform within the system, and a lot of ideas about change just
won’t work in China’s current societal structure. Therefore, there
definitely needs to be more initiative and more pressure for the society
to undergo sufficient reform. From this perspective, I think that the role
of the street movement participants is very significant, and the impact of
such grassroots activism on propelling the whole society forward cannot be
overlooked. Of course, their overall ability to influence, including their
ideas and knowledge, is weaker than previous generations, for example the
‘89 generation, but in today’s Chinese society, I highly value the
contribution they are making.

From the start, the street movement has never been tolerated by the
authorities. The suppression has been continuous and gotten steadily worse.
Up until the Southern Weekend Incident at the beginning of this year,
according to Wang Aizhong, the Guangdong authorities had been relatively
tolerant. When three or four people held up signs on the street, or in the
park, the police would intervene but were by and large lenient.  They
seldom took the participants into custody, let alone criminally detained
them. Even administrative detentions were used sparsely. At most the
authorities would summon the participants “to drink tea”, or make a record
of the event.

Prior to this year, the most serious crackdown occurred at a picketing
activity on the afternoon of March 30, 2012. That day, a dozen or so
activists staged a street protest on the Long Dong pedestrian street (龙洞步
行街
) in the Tianhe District of Guangzhou, and the signs they held read
“Fairness, Justice, Freedom, Equality, Human Rights, Legality, Democracy,
Republicanism,” “Without elections, there is no future,” “Hu Jintao take
the lead and publicize your finances,” and more. Their activities
attracted some hundreds of onlookers, and they weren’t subsequently
dispersed by the police. In early April, five of them were first
administratively detained, then criminally detained, for “allegedly
illegal assembly, parade, and demonstration.” After their lawyers
intervened, and thanks to the overwhelming online support, four of them
were released on bail awaiting trial, while Yang Chong was sent back to
his hometown in Jiangxi where he was sentenced to one year in prison.

Since the Southern Weekend Incident at the beginning of this year, Mr.
Wang told RFI , criminal detention has been directly applied to people who
have participated in street demonstrations. In February, biologist and
businessman Liu Yuandong (刘远东), an important player in the Southern
Street 
Movement, was arrested. He has been held without a trial ever since, far
beyond the legally prescribed time limit. Recent reports said Mr. Liu has
been mistreated in jail.

In May, Huang Wenxun, Yuan Fengchu and a number of others, all of them
regular participants in the Southern Street Movement, were detained in
Chibi, Hubei. They were all beaten up by the police, and Huang Wenxun was
tortured with electrical shocks. Other  participants were also detained.
After Shenzhen resident Yang Lin (杨林) had been missing for a month, his
family received a notice of his arrest and learned that he had been
accused of “inciting subversion of state power.”

The crackdown is clearly nationwide. Since April, China has detained close
to 200 dissidents and activists, including Dr. Xu Zhiyong, billionaire
investor Wang Gongquan (王功权) in its crackdown on the New Citizens
Movement 
and the prominent Guangzhou-based dissident Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄).

Right now the situation is severe, but the Southern Street Movement
participants have not backed down from their aspirations. Wang Aizhong
said, “We must unwaveringly continue on with the street movement,
influencing more people through our actions, and making the street
movement bigger and bigger. Of course, facing the current suppression, we
do our very best to avoid unnecessary losses. Our consensus is that we
need to lie low for the time being, suspending our street activities for a
while and focusing instead on developing strength. Our ultimate goal is to
build a China that is democratic, constitutional, and that conforms to
modern political civilization.”