China Brief: Special Issue on Social Stability in China - Wenran Jiang, David Kelly and Li Fan
Editor’s Note: This special issue of Jamestown’s China Brief is released just as the Chinese government revised its figures upward on the incidence of domestic social unrest. Yesterday, January 19, the Public Security Bureau revealed that the government recorded 87,000 “public order disturbances” in 2005″a 6.6 percent increase from figures for 2004. In the introductory article to this special, Wenran Jiang broadly explores the dynamics of unrest in China, emphasizing rising social stratification and demands for social justice and equity. The following articles investigate anti-state resistance in two different contexts. David Kelly analyzes the basis of social movements in urban contexts, while Li Fan provides a detailed examination of unrest in China’s countryside.
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All those doom and gloom prophet has been predicting China demise for decades but nothing has happened sofar because People protest NOT AGAINT THE CENTRAL GOVERMENT. They complain about local corruption. They see every dificulties as the impending doom of the regime. Now they say economic slowdown will be the ctalyst that will bring the regime to its knee What they afraid most is not China that failed but China that succed because it will be tantamount to challenge to their preconceived idea
As the English philosopher John Gray (a value-pluralist like me I might add) said in an article he wrote for The Guardian, what these China doomsters “fear most is not that the Chinese experiment will fail. It is that China will succeed.” That’s why they’re always looking (and seeing) signs of an impending collapse.
The existence of a successful alternative model of political economy is ideologically very threatening to Enlightenment fundamentalists of the liberal variety, as Hong Kong’s former Governor, Chris Patten, happily and very openly admits. This is why so many of them, like Will Hutton, Minxin Pei, John Pomfret and Jason Lee - to name but a few - keep looking for signs of a collapse - wish fulfillment! One minute it’s China’s environmental “crisis” that is expected to bring the central government down, the next minute it’s rural discontent. Now it’s the global economic crisis that they all hope will be the catalyst.
Read the China blog review.
I actually never thought of this until a few weeks ago when I was on a panel at the Kellogg School of Management’s “Greater China Business Conference.” It was nearing the end of the day and some student posed this question to me and the two China business experts, Jeff Day and Shi Han: Do you see China’s economic downturn leading to political instability? My first thought was why ask this of me? My second thought was why ask this of us? I eventually answered essentially/somewhat as follows:
No. I think that so long as the Chinese people believe Beijing is doing what it can to ameliorate the impact of the downturn, there will be no political insurrection against Beijing. I think that perception of how Beijing is acting is a far more important element in determining discontent against Beijing than is generally credited. If the people perceive Beijing as getting rich off the econimic problems of the Chinese citizenry, there will no doubt be anger with Beijing. But if the people see Beijing as doing whatever it can to solve the problems, I do not think the downturn itself will necessarily lead to a big increase in discontent towards Beijing.