China: The natives are restless

MOST OBSERVERS trying to make sense of contemporary China look at the country from the top down—they examine the contradictions of its hybrid political and economic system, marvel at how long it has worked so far, and wonder how much longer it can function without change.

Gordon G. Chang writing for Commentary takes the bottom-up approach instead and focuses on the people instead of the government. He reports that they are restless:

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…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.

Ready for anything…

(T)he economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling….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…As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.”

Wired into a national conversation…

Societies change—or reach a “tipping point,” to use the contemporary term—when enough people begin to think simultaneously in a new way. These days, Chinese thoughts and emotions travel through optical fiber at the speed of light—there are 123 million “netizens” in China, and 34 million of them are bloggers—and the Chinese are holding nationwide conversations for the first time in their history. Ideas—like, for instance, the idea of representative government—start out small and spread rapidly via countless chatrooms and online forums.

Asserting themselves both domestically…

“Ignore government propaganda and live freely,” wrote Liu Di, a college student better known online as the “stainless steel mouse.” The state detained her in 2002, but thousands signed online petitions in her behalf and one man even called a press conference to campaign for her release. Beijing, fearing the consequences of a trial, eventually let the frail Liu Di go. The mouse had roared, and the all-powerful state retreated—a dangerous precedent for a government that relies on fear, and on citizen self-restraint, to maintain control.

And in foreign affairs…

Last year, 44 million Chinese signed an Internet petition to stop Tokyo from securing a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In April, violent nationwide protests, triggered partly by new Japanese textbooks allegedly whitewashing Japan’s aggressive history, were organized largely by e-mail, text and instant messages, and Internet bulletin boards. “Net bugs” planned boat trips to raise the Chinese flag on the Diaoyu Islands, claimed by Beijing but under the control of Tokyo for more than three decades (the Japanese call them the Senkakus).

Chang’s conclusion?

All this is putting at risk the stability of Asia and of the international system as a whole.

The entire article is online here.