From AP, a look at the role grassroots activists are playing in protests those the recent one in Yongzhou, Hunan:
Zhang is part of a burgeoning breed of activists. Eager for social justice and linked by the Internet, they are challenging the party’s once tight grip on political life and showing how its information monopoly has been shaken by a rapidly changing society…
Chinese leaders have in part contributed to this wave, invoking the need for social fairness in a society once egalitarian but now fractured by a yawning rich-poor divide…
The movement ” known as rights defense or “wei quan” in Chinese ” took root in 2003, after police beat to death a young college graduate who was not carrying his residency papers. The government bowed to public outrage and curbed police powers for arbitrary detention, an unusual restraint to official authority and a move that energized socially conscious lawyers and scholars. [Full text]
