Do China’s Village Protests Help the Regime?
Over the past two weeks, the western press has focused on a striking story out of China: a riveting series of protests in Wukan, a fishing village in the country’s prosperous south. The story is depressingly familiar: Corrupt cadres sell off public land and villagers get nothing. Anger builds and protests erupt. Inept local officials negotiate and then turn to violence, in this case encircling the town with police in hopes of starving the population into submission.
According to interviews with villagers, officials had been selling off communal land in Wukan since the early 1990s, with few locals seeing any of the proceeds. Resentment finally boiled over this autumn when the last large plot of land in the village was sold—at a time when rising inflation meant many villagers wanted the land to grow their own crops. They rioted, chased the party leaders out of town, and chose a dozen representatives to negotiate. Their demands were that the sales be investigated and officials removed.
Police then allegedly kidnapped five of these leaders and beat one of them to death, igniting the most recent protests that have captured the outside world’s attention. The other four remain in police custody. Scores of foreign reporters descended on Wukan, providing blanket coverage of the riots and negotiations between the villagers and government leaders. The riots ended Wednesday after the government made some concessions and villagers agreed to go home.
What to make of all this? The overall sense in western reports is that things are spinning out of control in China, that the center can’t hold and the Communist Party can’t manage. We are told that China has tens of thousands of similar protests each year. The exact numbers aren’t clear but official figures show a dramatic increase in “mass incidents” over the past decade from just a few thousand to, by some measures, 80,000. Subconsciously we get the message: protests are a sign of instability, ergo the stability of China under one-party rule is eroding.
And yet to a degree this analysis doesn’t add up. If the government is so worried about protests, then why does it make the statistics available in the first place?..
