Posted on 01/25/2009 3:20:09 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
China fears riots will spread as boom goes sour
Today millions will leave the cities to return to their rural family homes for the new year celebrations. But this year Beijing hopes the newly jobless revellers will stay there - to prevent a fresh wave of unrest in the cities
Tania Branigan in Dongguan
Sunday 25 January 2009
They surged into the grimy streets around the factory: first scores, then hundreds, then more than a thousand, as word spread and tension loaded the stale, grey air. The boldest overturned a police van and smashed up motorcycles, then tore through the building destroying computers and equipment. The mood was exhilarated, angry and frightened.
"It happened so quickly ... There were maybe 500 involved and another 1,000 watching them. People were yelling: 'It's good to smash'," said a witness.
But the riot late last year at the Kai Da factory in Dongguan, amid the grim industrial sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, was not an isolated incident. It was one of tens of thousands of protests, many erupting from the same mixture of economic grievances, resentment of police and swirling rumour.
The numbers have been climbing steadily for years. But as the Chinese New Year dawns and the global economic crisis deepens, the government fears that mass unrest could challenge its control of the country, threatening a communist regime that has embraced capitalism with spectacular results.
Today should be the highlight of the year for migrant workers in the country's southern manufacturing hub, but the hundreds of millions who have travelled home for their annual family reunion have little to celebrate. This is the year of the ox in the Chinese zodiac; a symbol of hard work and tenacity. But no one feels bullish as exports plummet and factories shut their doors.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Up to the Olympic games, economy was boosted by Olympic related public work projects. Bad news on melamine milk was also suppressed during that period. Chinese economy visibly started to falter after the Olympic games. Now mass lay-off would come just before or after the new year celebration. Along comes plunge of domestic demand. Chinese gov will face unemployment shooting up and domestic demand plunge. Their solution will be more public work project and devalutation of yuan to boost export.
Ping!
I would think the only thing worse than China as an opponent would be a nuclear China that becomes wildly unstable.
Liots! Liots! Liots in the street!
Just out of curiosity, instead of throwing stones do they throw rice and chop sticks at the man?
As Obama ushers in the worst US economy in history who is going to buy all that Chinese junk.
Any clash will immediately draw thousands of crowds, who watch or join the fight.
Quantity has the quality of its own. It has been never truer in places other than China.
As I understand it China has been stable by an implicit bargain between the people and the government. The government supplies prosperity and the people politically submit. If the government ceases to supply wealth all bets are off. The Koreans, Russians, Japanese, Vietnamese. etc. had better hold on to their hats!
I think China and N. Korea would go off just about the same time. S. Korea/Japan/Russia are all entering the period of negative economic growth. Ugly time is coming in E. Asia.
Nothing like a ‘great patriotic war’ to redirect the mass’s attention away from the government.
So we can then expect those great sound effects when they riot like are heard in the great chinese kung foo movies?
Wait a minute...Bama said that China was a model country to emulate.
Today it looked more like China is copying the Bush administration, bribing the older generations and their children with free medical care on the backs of the young.
This nationalized healthcare plan will be pumped up in the media daily, it might just work in extending the regime’s credibility for this half of the economic cycle.
“Ugly time is coming in E. Asia”?
Ugly time is coming for the world.
Which is exactly what we're going to get.
Dunno. The uber-nuclear Soviet Union collapsed as well. Can't happen soon enough to China... although I'd prefer not to have Obambi at the helm at this time.
Here's a better question:
As Zero ushers in his "stimulus package" to "fix" our economy, who's gonna buy all his junk bonds to finance it?
Factories are closing by the score due to declining overseas orders.
Didn't all first-world economies start with domestic demand and then get into international trade?
There’s the real 9.7 trillion dollar question ... we are in for a rude awakening in DC and it can’t come soon enough for me.
Well, if the Chinese tyranny falls that could be the boost the world economy needs. A free China.
I am a hopeless optimist.
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