MCLC: another take on the Wukan protests

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 27 09:18:00 EST 2011


MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: another take on the Wukan protests
***********************************************************

Here's another take on the Wukan protests.

Kirk 

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Source: NY Review of Books (12/22/11):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/dec/22/do-chinas-village-protests
-help-regime/

Do China¹s Village Protests Help the Regime?
By Ian Johnson

Over the past two weeks, the western press has focused on a striking story
out of China: a riveting series of protests in Wukan, a fishing village in
the country¹s prosperous south. The story is depressingly familiar:
Corrupt cadres sell off public land and villagers get nothing. Anger
builds and protests erupt. Inept local officials negotiate and then turn
to violence, in this case encircling the town with police in hopes of
starving the population into submission.

According to interviews
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/world/asia/wukan-revolt-takes-on-a-life-
of-its-own.html?scp=3&sq=wukan&st=cse> with villagers, officials had been
selling off communal land in Wukan since the early 1990s, with few locals
seeing any of the proceeds. Resentment finally boiled over this autumn
when the last large plot of land in the village was sold‹at a time when
rising inflation meant many villagers wanted the land to grow their own
crops. They rioted, chased the party leaders out of town, and chose a
dozen representatives to negotiate. Their demands were that the sales be
investigated and officials removed.

Police then allegedly kidnapped five of these leaders and beat one of them
to death, igniting the most recent protests that have captured the outside
world¹s attention. The other four remain in police custody. Scores of
foreign reporters descended on Wukan, providing blanket coverage of the
riots and negotiations between the villagers and government leaders. The
riots ended Wednesday after the government made some concessions and
villagers agreed to go home.

What to make of all this? The overall sense in western reports is that
things are spinning out of control in China, that the center can¹t hold
and the Communist Party can¹t manage. We are told that China has tens of
thousands of similar protests each year. The exact numbers aren¹t clear
but official figures show a dramatic increase in ³mass incidents² over the
past decade from just a few thousand to, by some measures, 80,000.
Subconsciously we get the message: protests are a sign of instability,
ergo the stability of China under one-party rule is eroding.

And yet to a degree this analysis doesn¹t add up. If the government is so
worried about protests, then why does it make the statistics available in
the first place? In fact, most observers say that the vast majority of
these disturbances are handled peacefully‹the government sends in an
inspection team, money is tossed around (to pay back wages or unpaid
pensions, for example) and local officials often arrested. The protests
usually end quickly and often without violence once the specific issues
are solved. Few of the protests make broader demands.

In the case of Wukan, the government hasn¹t made much of an effort to
control the news. While major newspapers are not reporting the incidents,
one of the country¹s most important news magazines has just come out with
an in-depth and thoughtful article
<http://www.lifeweek.com.cn/2011/1220/36080.shtml>. More notably, the
country¹s tightly controlled micro-blogs are filled with analysis of the
Wukan protests. This is sometimes portrayed in the foreign press as an
area of the media outside the government¹s control‹in part because it
assumed that the ³Internet can¹t be controlled.² But the Internet is
actually very skillfully manipulated in China. Articles or posts that the
government does not like are quickly deleted by armies of censors who
troll the web and by sophisticated software programs that can block sites
or posts containing certain words (like ³Wukan²). Although cutting-edge
Internet aficionados find creative ways around these hindrances, the vast
majority of people in China read an Internet that the government has
vetted. Hence, blogs about Wukan aren¹t a sign of technology undermining
government control; instead they are tolerated, if not blessed, by the
government.

The idea is to allow people whom the authorities consider unthreatening to
write about the protests and come up with useful analyses that don¹t pose
a challenge to one-party rule. Thus we have seen a steady stream of
level-headed reporting and analysis by people like Yu Jianrong, a
researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who specializes in
rural unrest. In postings over the past ten days on the most popular
microblog, Sina Weibo, Yu has identified the problem as a conflict between
officials¹ desire for stability at all costs‹hence the heavy-handed police
presence in Wukan‹and locals¹ desire to protect their rights. He argues
that the emphasis over the past two decades of economic growth has led to
an elite (in this case, big real estate developers) that runs roughshod
over poorer members in society.

If this sounds like a radical, edgy analysis for China, it isn¹t. Yu¹s
blog has 1.3 million followers. Open discussion of China¹s wealth gap and
local corruption are standard fare in Chinese academic journals and even
in more mainstream media. Such news is harder to discuss in mass
publications or on television, but the party has always kept the tightest
reins on the media with the biggest audience. So the fact that Wukan isn¹t
on the front page of national newspapers but is being forthrightly
discussed in narrower‹though still widely accessible‹forums is entirely
predictable.

Perhaps this raises the question of why the government allows discussion
of these issues at all. China¹s technocrats are not fools. They realize
that these are serious problems and they want them solved. This is why a
growing rights consciousness is not entirely opposed by the party. When I
looked at rural unrest in China a decade ago
<http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375719196
>, I was surprised that many farmers found out by watching television news
>that they were being overtaxed. Aware that local officials were
>overtaxing locals and causing riots, the authorities in Beijing broadcast
>new tax codes, making sure that people knew that it was not government
>policy to tax them to death. Some locals rioted and many others filed
>class-action lawsuits‹but in the end local taxation was reduced (and
>eventually eliminated entirely). This wasn¹t despite central government
>efforts, but because of them. The result is that rural protests, which
>were a regular feature of 1990s China, are far less common.

Academics have a term for this: ³adaptive authoritarianism.² As Peter L.
Lorentzen of the University of California, Berkeley, has written
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=995330>, officials
view protests as way to gauge popular discontent. Small-scale protests
function as a feedback mechanism for the government of a country without
an active civil society or elections. Far from being a harbinger of regime
change, Lorentzen argues that, in China at least, they can stabilize the
regime.

The most recent developments in Wukan seem to reflect this pattern. After
talks between villagers and township authorities went nowhere, the much
more powerful provincial government sent in a negotiating team on
Wednesday. It was led by an official close to the governor, Wang Yang, who
is widely seen as a top candidate to join the Standing Committee of the
Communist Party¹s Politburo. This is the small body (the exact size varies
but is usually under ten members) that effectively runs China and that
will get new members next October. The villagers seem to have reduced
their demands and these seem to have been met
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/world/asia/top-provincial-leaders-to-mee
t-with-protesting-chinese-villagers-in-wukan.html?ref=world>. Soon after
the meeting, the protests were called off.

But while the Wukan protests seem to have been skillfully managed, the
government only allows the discussion to go so far. It¹s okay to say that
local officials are corrupt or that the real estate deal in question was
wrong. But it is not acceptable to have protesters link up with each other
in a national network. And it is certainly not acceptable to criticize the
root cause of Wukan¹s problems‹China¹s lack of checks and balances that
allow local officials to rule like warlords for decades before local
finally explode and the problems are finally addressed. These
deep-structure issues are still taboo.

Although these tactics are working now, their efficacy in the long run is
less clear. As Chinese have become wealthier and better educated, they are
demanding more control over their lives. In a more mature political
system, civil society‹the press, courts, non-governmental organizations,
and civic associations‹could help address situations like a village
protest before they require the direct intervention of one of the
country¹s most powerful politicians.

It¹s no coincidence either that the Wukan uprising was spurred by another
growing worry in China: the country¹s mounting economic challenges.
China¹s real estate bubble is deflating, inflation remains stubborn, and
exports are facing new competition. These can only add to tensions in
society, forcing leaders to stick more and more of their fingers in the
political system¹s holes. But given the élan of China¹s millennia-old
bureaucracy, the system itself does not seem at risk, at least in the
absence of some far larger precipitating event. In the meantime, the
lessons of Wukan may be that the country¹s leaders can leap from wall to
wall, plugging leaks and keeping the system working far longer than
westerners can imagine.

December 22, 2011, 12:22 p.m.




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