Web user reactions to Chen’s apparent suicide fall into two broad categories. While there was little controversy that Chen’s actions were wrong, a significant portion of comments analyzed evinced a soft spot for individuals whose lives are worsened by mismanagement and negligence from government agencies. To these sympathetic Web users, Chen’s life represents a tragic example of what someone born in 1950s China had to face. He suffered through the Cultural Revolution when, like many youth, he was forced to relocate to the countryside. Chen eventually returned to the city but struggled financially ever since. In order to claim post-retirement benefits, he faced endless tangles with bureaucrats, and Chen’s helplessness turned into desperation.

[…] Other users posited that Chen could have been called a martyr, if only he had aimed at a different target. Weibo user @天边那抹残阳 wrote, “We ought to punish the system and bureaucracy that caused this tragedy. He should have targeted the people who caused his problems, and he would have become a hero!”

[…] Another strain of online argument tilted in the other direction; netizens in this camp expressed sympathy for Chen’s struggles but argued that criminal intent to end innocent life should not be tolerated or forgiven. A series of images from a Japanese drama, frequently posted in connection with this case, eloquently argues that as difficult as Chen’s life had been, the mind of a criminal does not deserve sympathy. As a journalist for the Beijing News remarked after covering the news in Xiamen, “There is a significant difference between sympathizing with the citizen Chen Shuizong and sympathizing with the suspect Chen Shuizong.” [Source]

See also two propaganda directives on the case at CDT.

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Businesses say they are swamped with job applications but have few positions to offer as economic growth has begun to falter. Twitter-like microblogging sites in China are full of laments from graduates with dim prospects.

The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. “The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Lu Mai, the secretary general of the elite, government-backed China Development Research Foundation, acknowledged in a speech this month that less than half of this year’s graduates had found jobs so far. [Source]

The piece adds that even those who were lucky enough to find jobs over the winter are now seeing their prospective employers renege on their offers. The Atlantic’s Lotus Yuen writes that “the term ‘hardest job-hunting season in history’ has become a buzzword in China recently”:

This intimidating number is inextricably tied with discussion of another pressing issue: the employment rate of college graduates. The latest statistics released by Beijing Municipal Commission of Education show that only 33.6 percent of college graduates in Beijing have signed employment contracts, up 5 percent from April. Meanwhile, a recent report by Tecent-Mycos reveals that college graduates face gloomy employment prospects.

“I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to get a job this year,” said Miranda Zhang, who is graduating from a university in Beijing. “I feel desperate –campus recruitment is competitive, with dozens of people competing for one position, while HR offices out in the real world usually disregard graduating students because we do not have any prior work experience.” [Source]

One CCTV reporter called the latest figures “alarming,” but Forbes contributor Gordon Chang thinks that unemployment runs deeper than the official statistics indicate:

[...]The semi-official Global Times reports that one of China’s hottest businesses at the moment is the forging of employment contracts for students.  Some universities, concerned about the withdrawal of funding due to high unemployment of their grads, will not hand out diplomas before students supply evidence of imminent employment.  The fake contracts, of course, inflate the statistics reported to—and eventually the figures issued by—central educational authorities. [Source]

Still, the problem may reach beyond slow economic growth. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz visited a job fair in Shanghai, where HR managers look for college graduates to fill entry-level positions across a wide-range of industries, and observed that “neither group is interested in each other:”

Nicole Li is looking to hire college graduates for her property management company. “We need technicians to fix software problems, but college grads don’t have these skills,” says Li, frowning. “We need people for exhibitions who can do presentations in English, but they can’t do that, either.”

Li needs to hire people for 60 high-skilled jobs. She says among the thousands of candidates here today, she’ll be lucky if she finds one.

Tong Huiqin comes to this job fair every Friday. He graduated from the Shanghai Finance University six years ago. Since then, he’s jumped from one job to the next. “It isn’t hard to find a job,” says Tong. “It’s hard to find the right job.”

He’s worked as a supervisor for a bunch of companies, but hasn’t found the right fit. “You could have five hundred graduates and five hundred job openings here, and none of them would match up,” he says. [Source]

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Its first full-time residents will move in this year and, by 2020, Lanzhou New Area’s architects envisage its transformation into an industrial and logistics hub that is home to 500,000 people, with a hi-tech research centre dubbed “Wisdom Valley”. Officials hope it will generate £27 billion a year of output by 2030.

[…] Lanzhou New Area is part of a continuing “Go West” campaign to modernise China’s sprawling and underdeveloped hinterlands.

Perhaps even more importantly, it is also another step in a breathtaking push for urbanisation through which China’s incoming leaders hope to haul millions from rural poverty and create a vibrant home-grown consumer market to bolster the economy.

In March, when president Xi Jinping and prime minister Li Keqiang took power, Mr Li vowed to promote “a new type of urbanisation that puts the people at its heart.” [Source]

While some are excited at the prospect of urbanization, others are wary of its social and environmental consequences, particularly given its planned speed and scale. “If current trends continue”, Phillips notes, “China will be home to 1 billion urbanites by 2030, and by 2025 it will have 221 cities with more than 1 million residents.”

Read more on urbanization in China and the country’s rural-urban divide via CDT, including ‘8 Questions and a Podcast on ‘China’s Urban Billion’‘ with author Tom Miller.

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This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.

The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the past decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate small landholders.[Source]

Logistical problems involving local government spending may also postpone the $6.5 trillion dollar plan. The Taipei Times reports:

“The urbanization plan could be delayed. Top leaders have seen potential risks if the program cannot be kept on the right path,” said an economist at a top think tank which advises the Cabinet.

“The leadership aims to jumpstart reforms, but local governments see this in a different perspective — they view this as the last opportunity to boost investment,” said the economist, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.[Source]

Read more about urbanization in China, via CDT.

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The reports identified the man as Chen Shuizong, who was about 60 and impoverished. He had written a suicide note in which he expressed deep frustration, said the reports, which were based on details of the investigation released by officials in Xiamen. Mr. Chen was believed to have died in the explosion.

Southern Daily, the official newspaper of Guangdong Province, posted on its microblog a photograph of the man identified as Mr. Chen. He is seen pulling a bag behind him. The picture appeared to have been taken by an overhead security camera in the bus depot or on a street near it. [Source]

The Associated Press reported that Chen posted the suicide message to his own microblog account the day before the fire.  President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have called for an investigation, according to the Global Times, and authorities said they were treating the incident as a criminal case, From the South China Morning Post:

City officials told a news conference the criminal probe was launched after initial investigations showed the accelerant was petrol, while the bus was equipped with a diesel engine.

The investigation by experts and police also showed that the tyres and tank of the bus “remained complete”, official state news agency Xinhua said. [Source]

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Chinese officials like to paint a picture of China as one big happy multicultural family. To that end, the state pushes the stereotype that ethnic minorities are little more than entertainers who sing and dance in bright costumes.

Song-and-dance minority troupes regularly appear on state television — often singing in Mandarin rather than their native tongue. The performances are ramped up for important events. I attended the televised Chinese Communist Party’s 60th anniversary gala in 2009 and watched party leaders in suits listen stiffly to minority singers while pretty young women modeled ethnic hats.

[...] Unsurprisingly, Chinese media are less interested in showcasing genuine ethnic minority culture than in using portrayals of happy, traditional ethnic minorities as entertainment to boost Han rule. As Zang Xiaowei, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sheffield, explained to me this week, the state media aim to “strengthen Han ethnicity for nation-building purposes.”

[...] But when minorities attempt to venture outside the zones of tourism and entertainment, many hit a wall, a problem exacerbated in more restive areas like Tibet and Xinjiang. [Source]

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The truth is: for the rich, the law is a paper tiger, easily circumvented by paying a “social compensation fee” — a fine of 3 to 10 times a household’s annual income, set by each province’s family planning bureau, or by traveling to Hong Kong, Singapore or even America to give birth.

For the poor, however, the policy is a flesh-and-blood tiger with claws and fangs. In the countryside, where the need for extra hands to help in the fields and the deeply entrenched patriarchal desire for a male heir have created strong resistance to population control measures, the tiger has been merciless.

[…] The public outrage voiced against Mr. Zhang during the last week plays into the Party’s hands. Instead of attacking the government’s barbaric policy, the people are being encouraged to criticize the rich for escaping its claws.

Ending this scourge is a moral imperative. The atrocities committed in the name of the one-child policy over the last three decades rank among the worst crimes against humanity of the last century. The stains it has left on China may never be erased. [Source]

At The Guardian (via CDT), Ma recently explained how family planning riots in Guangxi in 2007 inspired his latest novel, The Dark Road.

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The 2010 census put the percentage of working-age women in the work force at 74. The figure stacks up well against other countries such as the United States and Australia, where about 75 percent of working-age women were employed in 2010. In Sweden, the female labor force participation for 2010 was 87.5 percent; France, 84 percent; Britain, 79 percent.

But China’s figure is high because it includes women working in the countryside, and unlike developed countries, nearly half of China’s population is still rural. The picture for urban women is very different.

China’s urban employment rate for working-age women fell to a new low of 60.8 percent in 2010, down from 77.4 percent 20 years earlier, according to census figures. The 2010 rate was 20.3 percentage points lower than that of men.

This troubling trend matters because the effort to move people from the countryside to the cities is a top policy priority of China’s new leaders — one that they see as crucial to boosting economic growth. [Source]

In BusinessWeek, Christina Larson makes a similar point and discusses challenges faced by women trying to move up China’s corporate ladder in a male-dominated corporate culture. Larson argues that China needs a movement similar to the Lean In movement launched by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg:

What explains China’s growing pay disparity? Wang Xiaolin, director of research at the International Poverty Reduction Center in China, told the People’s Daily that women more often chose to work in less lucrative industries. “Many female migrant workers stay at the low end of the service sector, such as working as waitresses in restaurants, while men take more positions in the manufacturing industry.” While this may be true, Wang’s explanation doesn’t sufficiently address the obstacles that college-educated professional women confront.

One hurdle may be the particular nature of China’s modern business landscape, which emphasizes guanxi—stoking a web of interlocking personal and professional connections. “Guanxi itself is such a male world,” explains Susan Brownell, an anthropologist specializing in China at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Businessmen go to KTV bars and often patronize prostitutes together. It’s hard for women to share the same bonding experiences.” That’s why at least one successful female business owner, bowing to the fact that male clients expect to be wined and dined at karaoke bars and massage parlors (where there is at least the possibility of paying for sex), has designated a young man on her staff to take out clients on her behalf. Her solution is crafty, but it’s a depressing form of accommodation. “Successful women in China must develop tactics to handle the male aspects of guanxi,” says Brownell.

As both Hong-Fincher and Larson make clear, China’s rapid urbanization is hitting women especially hard as it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find rewarding and lucrative work in urban areas. The women left behind in rural areas, meanwhile, are seeing some improvements in their lives as urbanization takes hold in society, but many challenges remain. Suicide rates of rural Chinese women, once among the highest in the world, have dropped considerably. But rural women remain largely powerless in Chinese society. From Eric Fish in the Atlantic:

By most measurable indicators, the lot of rural women has improved dramatically in the decade since Michael Phillips’ suicide study shocked the nation. In addition to the falling suicide rate, record numbers of women are attending college, rural healthcare has expanded greatly, and millions have been pulled from abject poverty.

But rural areas haven’t kept up with cities, and women haven’t kept pace with men. While per capita income tripled for rural residents from 2,253 RMB ($275) per year in 2000 to 6,977 RMB in 2011, incomes in cities nearly quadrupled from 6,280 to 23,979 RMB during the same period, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Rural women only earned 56 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2010, down from 79 percent in 1990. These gaps in money and power leave rural women vulnerable to exploitation.

Reliable statistics for sexual assault in China don’t exist, but Tsun-Yin Luo, a professor at the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih-Hsin University in Taipei, estimates that fewer than one out of ten sexual assaults are ever reported in China. “The patriarchal culture actually brings sexual violence to female victims,” she says. “Lots of victims of sexual assault feel ashamed of their victimization, and even if they don’t feel ashamed, their family ensures that they feel ashamed.”

Luo says that this disproportionally affects rural women, who don’t have the same access to information about their rights. “Women in the countryside tend to be left behind,” she says.

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Human Rights Watch says they interviewed women who told of violence by police and of being detained following sex with undercover police officers. One anonymous woman cited in the report said she and two colleagues were assaulted by police who “attached us to trees, threw freezing cold water on us, and then proceeded to beat us.”

Other problems are arbitrary detention of sex workers and discrimination by law enforcement officials when sex workers try to report crimes or abuse, the report said. It focused on women primarily in Beijing who engage in sex work on the streets, in public places such as parks, and in massage parlors and hair salons. While Chinese law treats most sex work-related offences as administrative violations, punishable by fines and short periods of police custody or detention, it allows for administrative detention of up to two years for repeat offenders.

In most of East Asia, prostitution is embedded in a business and political culture of entertaining clients and partners in karaoke bars and nightclubs. Prostitution also is illegal in Japan, but legal gray areas still allow it to flourish. South Korea toughened its anti-prostitution laws in 2004, driving thousands of prostitutes and pimps out of business, although the industry there remains widespread. Still, the level of police abuse against sex workers is deemed lower in those two countries in part because of a stronger rule of law.

“There is a much more robust legal system in both Japan and South Korea so this offers in the first place a greater protection for women who engage in sex work,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Of course you don’t have the kind of limitations on right to expression and right to assembly and so on that you face in China, which is also contributing to this climate enabling these abuses.” [Source]

In China, the frequent crackdowns on prostitution make the problem worse without making a significant dent in the industry, according to the report. From the Guardian:

Authorities have launched frequent drives against the sex industry, but it remains widespread and visible. While such campaigns see hundreds of women rounded up, brothels often continue to operate with little obvious difficulty.

While there have been hints of change in the government’s approach – three years ago the ministry of public security ordered an end to the public shaming of sex workers and said they should be treated more respectfully – problems remain widespread.

“The anti-prostitution drives are useless in terms of controlling the industry, but they lead to a spike in abuses,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch and one of the report’s authors.

Several interviewees said they had been assaulted by police or by auxiliary workers. Others reported police entrapping them or extorting sex. [Source]

Read the full report here via HRW.

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A one-line Xinhua dispatch yesterday quoted unnamed officials within the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) as saying that Liu Tienan, the 58-year-old deputy director of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), was being investigated, but it gave no details.

Sources close to the matter said Liu was formally placed under investigation yesterday and that his home and office were searched by CCDI officials on Saturday night.

…

Liu’s case was first announced on December 6 on the microblog account of a deputy editor of news magazine Caijing. Luo Changping reported on his verified Sina Weibo account a series of allegations against Liu, including that he fabricated academic credentials, improperly profited from his position and kept a mistress.

…

Liu made several public appearances in the following couple of weeks, including at a national working conference on development and reform on December 18. However, a source familiar with the case told the Post that Liu had been barred since mid-December from attending official activities related to external affairs.

[Source]

Liu becomes the second vice-ministerial-level official to be targeted by new president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, after the deputy party secretary of Sichuan province was placed under investigation in December. The announcement did not mention any specific allegations against Liu, who served as director of the National Energy Administration (NEA) until being replaced in March.

The NEA’s press office initially had called the allegations against Liu as “pure slander,” according to Gillian Wong of the Associated Press. Luo Changping, the journalist who initiated a public campaign against Liu last year, told The New York Times that he believed the official allegations were related to his own:

“I know there’s a direct connection, but I can’t say any more,” Mr. Luo said in a telephone interview.

“I had felt panicky before because nothing was happening, but I’ve breathed a sigh of relief now that this has happened,” he said, referring to the inquiry.

[Source]

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Of course, the Barkhor, which was originally a place of religious significance, won’t turn into a deserted street. On the contrary, it will become a bustling street, existing only for the benefit of tourists. But it will never again be the street of those Tibetans who circumambulate, come on pilgrimage, and prostrate themselves. Even if there manage to be pilgrims making prostrations there, they will simply serve to liven things up as background for the tourists, as one disaster follows another, winding down to a pathetic and miserable end for Lhasa. Historically, Lhasa has never had a mining cave-in. And now, it has had a mining cave-in. Historically, the Kyichu has never been blocked and dried up. Now it is drying up to the point that the fish are all dying. Historically, the Old City of Lhasa has never existed solely as a backdrop for tourists. And now it’s being changed into a replica of Sifang Street in Lijiang and Daka Dzong in “Shangri-La.” Might it be that one day, perhaps very soon, entry into the mountain fortress version of these tourist traps, “Old City Lhasa,” will require the purchase of tickets?

No place has disappeared so quickly; no place has been inundated so quickly. Sick at heart, Andre Alexander wrote; “Each time I go, the old houses are clearly fewer, stone by stone, brick by brick, alley by alley, street by street; even the dogs are going missing.” And today it’s being relaced by a new Lhasa City that is being commercialized by those in power. From here on in, it’s not just me, one individual, it’s many people who are losing the few remaining bits of the Lhasa cityscape that they so deeply love; from here on in, it’s not just my life, one individual life, it’s the lives of many people, all mixed together with memories of Lhasa, that are being covered over. It’s just as one internet friend bitterly put it: “Dismantling the old structures, excavating tunnels, building crossover bridges, stopping up the Kyichu, draining the groundwater: these people are truly the incarnations of hungry ghosts! Whatever they can carry away, they carry away, and what they can’t carry away they destroy!” [Source]

Woeser’s post also includes a number of photos of Lhasa under construction. The Jokhang Temple has been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. A recent post by Tea Leaf Nation (via CDT) looks at the environmental degradation of Tibet and the reasons why the international and domestic NGO community do not speak out against it.

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If the central government’s decrees are opaque, local authorities’ can be downright ridiculous. In 2001, hospital officials in the southern city of Shenzhen specified that nurses should show precisely eight teeth when smiling. In 2003, Hunan Province, in central China, stipulated that the breasts of female candidates for civil-service positions should be symmetrical. The next year, public safety officials in the northern city of Harbin ruled that policemen whose waistlines exceeded 36 inches had to go. In 2006, transportation officials in Zhejiang Province, just south of Shanghai, banned employees from sporting facial hair. The following year, in an effort to reduce the school-dropout rate, Pinghe County in Fujian Province, on the southeast coast, decreed that a junior high school diploma was required to marry.

Several of these rules have since been revoked, but their wacky and arbitrary nature demonstrates the arrogance of power in China. One can imagine all too easily their creators — sitting in comfortable armchairs, drinking high-grade tea and smoking fine cigarettes — discussing the issues at hand as if they were purely intellectual abstractions, never considering how ordinary people might react. That people will be unhappy is no cause for concern because, for so long, the power of the state has trampled on individual rights. Only when rules are so onerous that they stir actual protest do higher-ups take notice: “You guys are just making a mess of things,” they’ll tell their bureaucrat underlings. “This is not good for social stability.” The rules are then quietly rescinded — sometimes.

[Source]

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An official with the Jiangsu provincial family planning commission confirmed that Mr. Zhang was under investigation and said it was ongoing but gave no other details. “We don’t know yet how we will deal with it, if it turns out to be true,” said the official, who gave only his surname, Li.

[...]

News of the investigation comes at awkward time for the China’s family planning authorities. Beijing officially continues to defend the one-child policy, saying it has prevented 400 million births and helped lift the country out of poverty. But public anger over forced late-term abortions, anxiety over gender imbalances and shifting demographics have prompted increasing calls for the policy to be scrapped, or at least relaxed.

Shifting attitudes toward the one-child rule were evident online Thursday, as a number of Internet users rushed to defend Mr. Zhang.

“I applaud Zhang Yimou for having more than one child,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service. “Having children is a right bestowed on man by Heaven.” [Source]

As the Guardian reports, anger has centered around Zhang’s treatment for breaking the law as compared to the that of common citizens:

Disparity in the treatment of those who break the laws has fuelled public anger about inequality.

“It is just a policy for limiting the poor’s right to give birth,” one angry microblogger wrote in response to the news about Zhang.

Another asked: “Why doesn’t China have the world’s respect? Look at the rich and officials with flocks of wives and mistresses … If ordinary people had more children they would be punished or fined to death. He is fine.

“Zhang’s quality is worse than ordinary people. An unfair society can never receive respect.” [Source]

AP has more on the Internet reaction to the news:

Users of China’s lively social media lined up to criticize Zhang and drew distinctions between how the elite and ordinary people are treated.

“However many children a person has is their basic right, but in a twisted society, basic rights have become a privilege,” Beijing resident Liu Weiling, who works for a media company, wrote on Sina Weibo.

“Why is China unable to win the world’s respect?” asked author Christopher Jing. “Rich people with groups of mistresses, old celebrities changing wives, Zhang Yimou getting so many privileges. Four women and seven kids, if this was an ordinary person they would have killed you or fined you an unreasonable amount of money, but he is fine … he is no better than ordinary people, such an unfair world will never gain respect.” [Source]

Read more about the one-child policy and about Zhang Yimou via CDT.

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Police from Xinyu, in the southern province of Jiangxi, detained Liu for “inciting subversion of state power”, her lawyer, Zheng Jianwei, told Reuters, by telephone. The charge is often leveled against critics of the party.

Police could not be reached for comment.

Liu, who has also advocated on women’s rights issues, last year started demanding that officials disclose their assets, Zheng said. She took her campaign to the internet and to fellow Chinese.

Zheng said he did not know the exact reason for Liu’s detention, but added that he had warned her “to be aware of her actions” six months ago.

A fellow activist told Patrick Boehler of the South China Morning Post that Liu was one of eight people who were apprehended by unidentified men on April 27 as they prepared to travel to Suzhou to commemorate Peking University student who was executed during the Cultural Revolution for criticizing the Communist Party:

Two of the people detained along with Liu have been released, Jiang said. One of them, Li Xizhen, shared on her microblog photos of bruises from beatings she said she had sustained in police custody. Li could not be reached on the phone.

Liu’s daughter, Liao Minyue, who on her microblog has documented several unsuccessful requests for information on her mother’s fate, declined to comment for fear of harming her mother’s case.

“Because the law doesn’t require relatives to be notified for such charges, we actually don’t know how many people have been arrested and charged,” said Hangzhou-based lawyer Wang Cheng, who has previously helped Liu in legal matters.

He said he could so far only confirm that five people including Liu were still detained, but only the charges against Liu had been made known, he said.

Police in Beijing detained four activists in early April for holding up banners in a public square demanding that top government officials publicly declare their assets, and four more were detained later in the month for participating in the street campaign. The issue of financial disclosure has simmered since last year, when some officials at the 18th Party Congress told foreign reporters that they would be open to the idea as a way to curb corruption. It also became a popular Weibo topic after Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin addressed financial disclosure on his own microblog.

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In March, China completed its transition to a new leadership team. The usual fanfare — masses of black limousines bringing nearly 3000 delegates to the Great Hall of the People to hear proud speeches about the country’s three decades of economic growth and waxing international influence — was dampened by a sense that, by the next time the party comes to town, there might not be as much to celebrate. Xi Jinping, the new leader of the Chinese Communist Party, and his colleagues have repeatedly expressed alarm at increasing social protests. According to confidential but widely circulated Chinese police estimates, there are now about 180,000 mass protest incidents each year, roughly 20 times more than there were in the mid-1990s. China’s leaders portray the surge of protests as fueled by popular outrage over the yawning gap between rich and poor — a chasm that the leaders have spent a decade trying to close. In reality, though, Chinese citizens are angry about a different gap: the one between the powerful and the powerless. The CCP has turned a blind eye toward this problem. Unless the situation changes and China’s new leaders start finding ways to temper popular outrage over procedural injustices and official corruption, the prospect that they will maintain political order until the next leadership transition is bleak.

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