From The Wall Street Journal, via A Glimpse of the World:
Recent reported police killings of protestors in the southeast Chinese villages of Panlong and Dongzhou raise serious questions about China’s struggle for a more sophisticated strategy to contain mounting unrest. For now, mass protests don’t threaten the government’s survival, but the specter of chronic unrest is haunting Beijing’s leaders and affecting vital policy initiatives, including relations with the U.S.
Since Tiananmen Square, China’s leaders have fought to avoid having to face the stark choices that produced that massacre ” major concessions or bloody suppression. But by the late ’90s, police statistics showed that rising numbers of citizens were taking their resentments into the street, with the number of protests ” officially called “mass incidents” ” increasing from 8,700 in 1993 to 74,000 by 2004. Enraged at massive layoffs, plundered pensions, confiscated land and corrupt officials, many Chinese hope protests will attract the attention of senior Party leaders and thereby frighten local bureaucrats into making concessions. This often happens, prompting even more protests as word spreads that officials are caving in to demands.
