MCLC: ceaseless quest to silence dissent

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: ceaseless quest to silence dissent
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Source: NPR (10/30/12):
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/30/163658996/in-china-a-ceaseless-quest-to-silen
ce-dissent
 

In China, A Ceaseless Quest To Silence Dissent
By Louisa Lim

China is about to get new leaders for the first time in a decade, and it
comes at a crucial moment for the world's most populous nation. Economic
growth, which surged for decades, has slowed. Demands for political reform
have increased and the Communist Party has been hit by scandal. In a
series of stories this week, NPR is examining the multiple challenges
facing China. In this story, Louisa Lim looks at China's pervasive efforts
to maintain order.

In China, government critics call it "the era of stability maintenance."
It's their label for the government's policy over the past decade of
prizing internal stability above all else, no matter the cost.

Beijing this year is spending $111 billion on its domestic security
budget, which covers the police, state security, militia, courts and
jails. This is now higher than its publicly disclosed military expenditure.

Three scenes illustrate how the state security apparatus targets
individuals, as well as groups of people, and how the system feeds off
itself.
 

Cui Weiping, a soft-spoken, retired film professor, has been monitored by
state security agents for the past nine years. The surveillance began
after she wrote a letter sympathizing with mothers whose children were
killed in the 1989 student protests.

SCENE ONE: Retired film professor Cui Weiping is a small, tidy woman in
her 50s with a radiant smile and an easy laugh. It's difficult to imagine
anyone who looks less threatening.

But for the past nine years, state security has monitored her movements,
ever since she co-wrote a letter expressing her support for a group of
mothers whose children were killed on June 4, 1989, the day the government
cracked down on protesters in and around Tiananmen Square.

Her phone has been tapped, her car followed, her life subject to
directives from state security agents.

"Sometimes they tell me not to go to certain places, not to meet certain
friends, not to go to one particular bookstore," she says. "There are
restrictions on my movements."

This is how the system works: monitoring those individuals considered a
threat to stability, limiting their freedom to act.
The tentacles of China's state reach deep into Cui's life: Her husband has
been urged to put pressure on her; fellow teachers from her university
spied on her, sometimes even following her by car. Eventually she was
pushed to retire, a pattern common among dissidents employed by state-run
institutions.

Cui is philosophical.

"I think money spent on stability maintenance is a big burden to society,
including the government," she says. "Once interest groups coalesce around
that funding, they need to feed themselves via the stability maintenance
machine. Then more instability is needed, right?"

SCENE TWO: A group of tearful elderly petitioners is being berated angrily
by a younger official. They are retired special forces soldiers, who have
suffered health problems after working on what they describe as a secret
nuclear project in the 1970s.

The petitioners had been hoping to lodge a complaint in Beijing about the
poor treatment they received in their hometown. But they were intercepted
by local officials on arrival at the train station in Beijing and are
detained in their hometown's representative office in the Chinese capital,
which is an unmarked apartment in a secret location.

"Your coming to Beijing has led to instability," the local official tells
them in a harsh tone. "As veterans, you should share the country's
difficulties, not make trouble for your motherland."

One of the veterans, choking back tears, gets on his knees in front of a
young official, but to no avail. This is footage from a documentary called
An Interceptor from My Hometown, which follows a deputy mayor, whose job
is stopping petitioners. In the process, he lays bare the whole system.

"We are buying stability with money," says the deputy mayor, who is given
the pseudonym of He Xiaozhou in the film.

He is brutally honest about how corrupt the system has become. He
describes how his rural town spends roughly $25,000 per year on one
particular petitioner, sometimes resorting to paying him not to cause
trouble.

He also admits that he pays bribes to erase complaints that petitioners
have already lodged, which could block the chances of promotion for
himself and his superiors.

"We have to beg related departments to cancel records," he admits. "We
have to bribe them and the police. They profit from their power, and so
gain more power to sell off."

Filmmaker Zhang Zanbo made a documentary showing how local officials go to
great lengths to prevent citizens from lodging protests in Beijing. The
local officials sometimes pay bribes to have complaints erased from
government records.


Even the train conductors profit from the security apparatus, by spotting
the petitioners and tipping off officials so they can be detained on
arrival in Beijing.

"They sold them to the Beijing liaison office," he says, "for $64 a head."

In the film, as the deputy mayor wines and dines and describes gambling
sessions with other officials, the petitioners are detained illegally in a
secret liaison office.

"They can make and remake the laws at will," one petitioner complains as
he reflects on the extent to which maintaining stability is the overriding
imperative, trumping even China's Constitution.

This deputy mayor is honest about his own role.

"Being an official is like being a prostitute. They're selling their
bodies; we're selling our smiles. And we're selling more than them. We're
selling our dignity," he says.

As he enjoys a foot massage, he describes visiting Zhongnanhai, the
Beijing compound where the country's leaders live. He was impressed by its
solemn, silent atmosphere.

For the film's director Zhang Zanbo, this sums up China's current
situation.

"It's absolutely a metaphor for the era of stability maintenance," he
says. "The silence he talked about in the leadership compound is actually
achieved by sacrificing the voices of those outside."

SCENE THREE: The voices the leadership doesn't want to hear are the angry
screams of young men as they clash with rows of well-armed riot police.

This was the scene in June, when three nights of violence ripped through
Shaxi town in southern China's Guangdong province. Yet such scenes are
replicated across the country. One Chinese professor, Sun Liping,
estimates there were 180,000 "mass incidents" in 2010.

The reasons for such mass protests are varied: Land requisitions,
environmental protests, ethnic grievances and employment disputes are just
some of them.

But two days after the Shaxi riots, many of the migrants from Sichuan, who
were blamed for rioting, accuse the government of mishandling a minor
dispute, causing discontent to explode.

Police stand on watch on the streets of Shaxi, China, following three days
of riots in June.

"It started with a playground fight between two kids," says one migrant
worker who asked for his name to be withheld for fear of the consequences.

The migrant workers say one of their children was involved in the fight
and was brutally beaten by private security forces, to whom policing had
been outsourced.

"The police beat anyone who was there with steel pipes and batons," he
says. "The relatives of those who got beaten thought it was unfair, so
more and more people went there, and it just escalated."

As he talks, a car pulls up. Inside the vehicle is a man swathed in
bandages.

"We didn't break any laws," says the man, who gives his name as Mr. Zhen.
He has 10 stitches in his head. "We were just spectators. I was seeing my
friend home, when I was hit. He was hit in the head, too, and has eight
stitches. In the hospital, there were at least 100 injured people. But
they were all chucked out."

The story is all over the local TV news stations, and these migrants are
outraged when they hear the way the episode is portrayed by the broadcasts
‹ from the number of nights the violence went on to claims that it was
under control at a time migrants say rioting continued. The migrants have
tried to post accounts of police brutality and photos showing their
version of events online, but these have been blocked.

One man, who asked that his name not be used, is apoplectic with rage at
what he hears on television.

"It's absolutely untrue," he says. "In the past, we never questioned the
government's story. But this time, we saw everything ourselves. Why did
they take down our photos? You can imagine why. They're just using
violence to enforce stability."

Stability maintenance means whole swaths of the country are sealed off,
with Tibetan areas effectively becoming a militarized zone as growing
numbers of Tibetans immolate themselves in protest against Chinese rule.
At one Tibetan temple, monks begged me to leave because they were so
scared of the consequences.

In the far-western autonomous region of Xinjiang as well, policing has
been stepped up following riots in 2009. But as the discontent balloons,
maintaining stability by force is increasingly difficult.

Corruption throughout the machinery of stability maintenance means
increasing numbers of people benefit from instability, or the growing
"empire of unaccountability" as Kerry Brown from the University of Sydney
describes it.

And so the paradox: The more stability is "maintained," the less stable
the country becomes.