BEIJING WORRIES AS SENSE OF INJUSTICE DEEPENS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES GLOBAL INSIGHT ( A MUST READ )

Beijing worries as sense of injustice deepens

By Rahul Jacob in Hong Kong

Published: June 15 2011 18:01


Numbers associated with China are usually big. Even so, a Beijing academic’s recent estimate of the number of “incidents” – an official euphemism for strikes, protests and riots – at 180,000 last year, double the number five years ago, is huge. It works out at 493 a day.


That might seem implausibly high even for a country of more than 1bn citizens, but not in the past few days.


In the southern town of Zengcheng, usually better known for its production of blue jeans, migrant workers rioted over the weekend after security staff manhandled a pregnant 20-year-old street hawker. On Monday the focus was in the eastern city of Yangxunqiao, where workers seeking compensation for lead poisoning were prevented by riot police from boarding buses to go and petition higher authorities. In the central province of Hubei last week protesters pelted police with eggs and bottles after the death in custody of a popular anti-corruption official.


Responding to a wave of strikes in southern China last year, Beijing said it intended to double the minimum wage over the next five years. Buying off strikers is child’s play, however, compared with dealing with ever larger numbers of people who believe Chinese society to be manifestly unjust.


The common thread that ties these protests of the past week together is not primarily economic, but rather that a growing tribe of migrant workers and others feel oppressed by local authorities.


Martin King Whyte, a Harvard University sociologist, argues that the idea that growing financial inequality in China is at the root of growing unrest is wrong. Most Chinese regard individual wealth as the product of education and hard work, he argues in his book Myth of the Social Volcano. In fact, Chinese are almost American in their belief that individual effort enables people to get ahead, Mr Whyte posits.


The injustice of having his house demolished by corrupt local officials prompted Qian Mingqi, a 52-year-old, to set off bombs at government buildings in Fuzhou city in Jiangxi province in late May, killing himself in what appeared to be a suicide bombing directed at the unyielding state.

On the internet before his death Qian complained of having gone from pillar to post seeking justice after the illegal demolition of his home. “Ten years of fruitlessly trying to seek redress have forced me to go on a path I did not wish to take,” he wrote. Within days of his death, thousands had posted comments on the internet, lauding him as a hero.


Alarmed by the wave of sympathy for people who use violence in protests against the government, the state-owned Global Times newspaper editorialised last week that the correct response was to improve the rule of law, not use the law of the jungle.


It is precisely because so many local officials resort to the law of the jungle that there is a steady rise both in the number of protests and their intensity. That their misdeeds are being written about online or shared via mobile phone texts and photos has added to the speed at which protests erupt and spread.


The convergence of this widening sense of injustice in the past few months with the grievances of migrant workers will worry Beijing. Migrant workers often feel aggrieved because they lack the hukou, or residency papers, needed to secure social insurance, healthcare and housing.


The leadership is noticing. A government think-tank warned on Tuesday that if migrants were “not absorbed into urban society ... many conflicts will accumulate”. Guangdong’s charismatic party secretary, Wang Yang, called last year for migrants to be treated with more respect. In Zengcheng, officials were televised this week paying a hospital visit to the Sichuanese worker whose treatment prompted the unrest.


That could all be window-dressing. The rule of law seems a long way off in China, never more so than this year with detentions and disappearance of Chinese human rights lawyers and high-profile dissidents. But when a full-on riot is provoked by security personnel pushing a pregnant woman around for the “crime” of selling goods on the street, it is a sign that the laws of the jungle favoured by local officials is not working.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011