While the increasing incidents of protests and unrest have been written about repeatedly in the foreign media, this report from The Times gives a more dire picture, though the report isn’t quite as dramatic as the headline suggests:
The American economist Nouriel Roubini said growth figures of 6.8% in the fourth quarter of 2008 masked the reality that China was already in recession – a view privately shared by many Chinese financial analysts who dare not say so in public.
Even security guards and teachers have staged protests as disorder sweeps through the industrial zones that were built on cheap manufacturing for multinational companies. Worker dormitory suburbs already resemble ghost towns.
In the southern province of Guangdong, three jobless men detonated a bomb in a business travellers’ hotel in the commercial city of Foshan to extort money from the management.
