Gordon Chang: China in Revolt
[Gordon G. Chang writes widely on China and North Korea and is the author most recently of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World (Random House).]
... The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People’s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worker and peasant protests, such as the wave of labor riots in Shanghai in 1957, were of no lasting significance. So strong was Mao’s grip that there were virtually no disturbances even during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when his industrial and agricultural policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. Nor were there anti-state protests of consequence in the later 60’s or the 70’s.
After Mao’s death, however, and especially in the second half of the 1980’s, the Chinese people began to express discontent at almost every opportunity. In April 1985, hundreds traveled to Beijing without permission; there they staged a sit-in outside party headquarters to protest their continued exile dating to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the subsequent months and years, demonstrations—many of them directed against party rule—spread throughout the country. By January 1987 students were rallying in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China.
Deng Xiaoping, the country’s paramount leader at the time, declined to respond to this general mood of discontent, itself fueled largely by economic dislocation. Fortunately for him and the other veteran cadres, the Chinese people were not ready to demand revolutionary change. During the exhilarating days of the Beijing Spring in 1989, more than a million students, workers, and their allies would congregate in Tiananmen Square—but they came there to talk to their leaders, not to remove them. For me, the most powerfully suggestive image of the time was not of the euphoric crowds in Tiananmen Square, or the lone man in front of the tanks, but the three motionless students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People. This solitary trio had come to supplicate their leaders, who refused to see them.
This would be one of the last such moments. Six weeks later, Deng decided to use force to put down the protests. Beijing’s residents, armed with rocks and little else, fought back against the well-equipped soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. By the time the tanks had pushed their way to the students gathered in Tiananmen Square, both soldiers and citizens had already died. The conflict was not inevitable—many senior party leaders and generals had urged conciliation—but Deng saw the need to reassert convincingly the supremacy of the party.
As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People’s Republic. By the end of the 1990’s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them—one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang—may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China’s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.
Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such “mass incidents”; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.
Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests—no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.
“China is facing enormous problems,” notes the scholar Steven Jackson, but “this characterization has been true for the past 150 years.” David Shambaugh writes similarly of China’s “curiously ambivalent state of ‘stable unrest.’” Because demonstrators have yet to link up across the country, and do not clearly exhibit the signs of a truly destabilizing movement—generalized anger, solidarity among the aggrieved, an ability to resist official action, strong leadership, a broad coalition, and the like—China’s citizens are still not seen as posing any particular danger to the People’s Republic.
What we see today may indeed be nothing new: kings and emperors have suppressed countless protests over the millennia of Chinese history. Nonetheless, from time to time, the common folk—the laobaixing—have also changed their rulers by means of violence. More importantly, in the last century they have staged two tumultuous revolutions in quick succession—Sun Yat-sen’s in 1911 and Mao’s less than forty years later.
Every society changes from one day to the next. But the economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling. Mao regimented the Chinese people, oppressed them, clothed them in totalitarian garb, and denied them their individuality. Today, they may not be free, but they are assertive, dynamic, and sassy. A mall-shopping, Internet-connected, trend-crazy people, they are remaking their country at breakneck speed. Deprived for decades, they do not only want more, they want everything.
Change of this sort is inherently destabilizing, especially in a one-party state. Social unrest, writes Samuel Huntington, becomes especially dangerous when political institutions fail to keep up with the forces unleashed by economic change. That is the dilemma of the Chinese Communist party, which, even as it has sponsored uninterrupted economic progress, has itself changed remarkably little from Mao’s days, and still stands in the way of meaningful political reformation.
As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.” In pre-revolutionary France, discontent was highest in those areas that had seen the greatest improvement; the Revolution itself followed a period of unprecedented economic advance. In the late 20th century, the same trends played out in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan.
In China today, it is middle-class citizens, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of economic reform, who are once again confirming the pattern. In Shanghai, homeowners recently fought a state-owned developer who had reneged on his agreement to keep an area of open land in the middle of a multi-building project; one group of residents tore down a fence to stop construction, and when the developer put up another, an even larger group demolished it. In Dongzhou in prosperous Guangdong province, riot police ended up killing perhaps as many as twenty people who were protesting the government’s arbitrary seizure of their land for a power project and denying them the use of a nearby lake.
This is not like Tiananmen. In 1989, Chinese protesters were peaceful until attacked. Those in Dongzhou, however, used pipe bombs as an initial tactic, to break up police formations. In present-day China, the well-to-do act like hooligans, and will even resort to deadly force, if that is what it takes to defend their rights.
Deng Xiaoping’s strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. It was successful, but only for a decade. Change begat the demand for more change. Grievances that were once tolerable began to appear intolerable when people realized they could be remedied. Since the end of the 1990’s, the laobaixing are no longer, to borrow one of Mao’s favorite phrases, “poor and blank.”...
Read entire article at Commentary
... The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People’s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worker and peasant protests, such as the wave of labor riots in Shanghai in 1957, were of no lasting significance. So strong was Mao’s grip that there were virtually no disturbances even during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when his industrial and agricultural policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. Nor were there anti-state protests of consequence in the later 60’s or the 70’s.
After Mao’s death, however, and especially in the second half of the 1980’s, the Chinese people began to express discontent at almost every opportunity. In April 1985, hundreds traveled to Beijing without permission; there they staged a sit-in outside party headquarters to protest their continued exile dating to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the subsequent months and years, demonstrations—many of them directed against party rule—spread throughout the country. By January 1987 students were rallying in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China.
Deng Xiaoping, the country’s paramount leader at the time, declined to respond to this general mood of discontent, itself fueled largely by economic dislocation. Fortunately for him and the other veteran cadres, the Chinese people were not ready to demand revolutionary change. During the exhilarating days of the Beijing Spring in 1989, more than a million students, workers, and their allies would congregate in Tiananmen Square—but they came there to talk to their leaders, not to remove them. For me, the most powerfully suggestive image of the time was not of the euphoric crowds in Tiananmen Square, or the lone man in front of the tanks, but the three motionless students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People. This solitary trio had come to supplicate their leaders, who refused to see them.
This would be one of the last such moments. Six weeks later, Deng decided to use force to put down the protests. Beijing’s residents, armed with rocks and little else, fought back against the well-equipped soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. By the time the tanks had pushed their way to the students gathered in Tiananmen Square, both soldiers and citizens had already died. The conflict was not inevitable—many senior party leaders and generals had urged conciliation—but Deng saw the need to reassert convincingly the supremacy of the party.
As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People’s Republic. By the end of the 1990’s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them—one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang—may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China’s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.
Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such “mass incidents”; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.
Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests—no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.
“China is facing enormous problems,” notes the scholar Steven Jackson, but “this characterization has been true for the past 150 years.” David Shambaugh writes similarly of China’s “curiously ambivalent state of ‘stable unrest.’” Because demonstrators have yet to link up across the country, and do not clearly exhibit the signs of a truly destabilizing movement—generalized anger, solidarity among the aggrieved, an ability to resist official action, strong leadership, a broad coalition, and the like—China’s citizens are still not seen as posing any particular danger to the People’s Republic.
What we see today may indeed be nothing new: kings and emperors have suppressed countless protests over the millennia of Chinese history. Nonetheless, from time to time, the common folk—the laobaixing—have also changed their rulers by means of violence. More importantly, in the last century they have staged two tumultuous revolutions in quick succession—Sun Yat-sen’s in 1911 and Mao’s less than forty years later.
Every society changes from one day to the next. But the economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling. Mao regimented the Chinese people, oppressed them, clothed them in totalitarian garb, and denied them their individuality. Today, they may not be free, but they are assertive, dynamic, and sassy. A mall-shopping, Internet-connected, trend-crazy people, they are remaking their country at breakneck speed. Deprived for decades, they do not only want more, they want everything.
Change of this sort is inherently destabilizing, especially in a one-party state. Social unrest, writes Samuel Huntington, becomes especially dangerous when political institutions fail to keep up with the forces unleashed by economic change. That is the dilemma of the Chinese Communist party, which, even as it has sponsored uninterrupted economic progress, has itself changed remarkably little from Mao’s days, and still stands in the way of meaningful political reformation.
As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.” In pre-revolutionary France, discontent was highest in those areas that had seen the greatest improvement; the Revolution itself followed a period of unprecedented economic advance. In the late 20th century, the same trends played out in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan.
In China today, it is middle-class citizens, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of economic reform, who are once again confirming the pattern. In Shanghai, homeowners recently fought a state-owned developer who had reneged on his agreement to keep an area of open land in the middle of a multi-building project; one group of residents tore down a fence to stop construction, and when the developer put up another, an even larger group demolished it. In Dongzhou in prosperous Guangdong province, riot police ended up killing perhaps as many as twenty people who were protesting the government’s arbitrary seizure of their land for a power project and denying them the use of a nearby lake.
This is not like Tiananmen. In 1989, Chinese protesters were peaceful until attacked. Those in Dongzhou, however, used pipe bombs as an initial tactic, to break up police formations. In present-day China, the well-to-do act like hooligans, and will even resort to deadly force, if that is what it takes to defend their rights.
Deng Xiaoping’s strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. It was successful, but only for a decade. Change begat the demand for more change. Grievances that were once tolerable began to appear intolerable when people realized they could be remedied. Since the end of the 1990’s, the laobaixing are no longer, to borrow one of Mao’s favorite phrases, “poor and blank.”...