Posted on 01/24/2005 1:05:31 AM PST by eluminate
SHANGHAI - Everywhere in developed, urban China - Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou - the message was the same. The next "counterrevolutionary rebellion" - as the Communist Party defined the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - if it happens, will be a peasant revolution. Foreign diplomats and Chinese scholars in Beijing or young, urban, 'Net-connected professionals in Guangzhou have told Asia Times Online in unmistakable terms: nobody from the party's "fourth generation" leadership wants to go back to the Maoist model of economic autarky and foreign-policy isolation.
A constant pattern emerges: if a villager, for instance, accuses a local party boss of corruption, he inevitably goes to jail, accused of "provoking riots". The key issue in the book - and in China's modernization as well - is corruption. A whole chapter details how local, rural party officials twist their numbers to cheat the party leadership in Beijing out of revenue.
The party loses its grip The countryside is getting angrier by the day. In 2003 - the latest data available - there were no fewer than 58,000 "civic disturbances" involving more than 3 million people. A mob of 10,000 torch police cars in Chongqing, 100,000 demonstrators force the postponement of a dam project in Sichuan, 20,000 miners and their families riot against layoffs and loss of pensions at a bankrupt mine in the depressed northeast. Thunderous silence is the official media's norm. It's taken for granted that every city except ultra-policed Beijing has been facing demonstrations or eruptions of spontaneous violence.
A peasant Tiananmen? The ultimate, lethal danger for the Chinese Communist Party is the merging of peasant protests with urban demonstrations - peasants, mingong, former state employees - all losers united. Thus many of President Hu's recent actions, affirming his iron hand.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
This one is good too. "China's rule of law in theory, not practice" By Fong Tak-ho
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GA22Ad03.html
China is becoming "the coast vs the most"
Bump for latter read.
Wonderful article. It is interesting to think of this in light of the information and technology revolution and the ever-increasing filtering down thereof. If Ukrainian kleptocrats are tossed out by popular will, how much longer will it take for the regional governors, facing far greater numbers with far less to lose, to have their reckoning?
realy has not much to do with that its more of a struggle within the system and how its coping. Bad comparison overall here its total dictat upon the lower classes. Sort of similar when india had its class system except the "untouchables" the absolutely lowest class was 80% of the population in china's case.
hopefully more people read both articles.
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