Crux
23rd February 2011, 17:38
China: Jasmine Revolution threat rattles one-party dictatorship
Wednesday, 23 February 2011.
The party is very, very nervous, way beyond their normal level of anxiety.
Dikang, chinaworker.info
These were hardly the actions of a secure, self confident regime. The call on Chinese language micro-blogging sites for gatherings last Sunday, February 20, to support a Jasmine Revolution brought forth an overwhelming pre-emptive show of force by state security forces. Tens of thousands of police were mobilised in more than 20 cities. Dozens of lawyers, activists and dissidents were arrested, and internet censorship was stepped up. This was the biggest crackdown since October when dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite this, incredibly, there were small protest gatherings in Beijing and Shanghai. Otherwise the event was more of a shadow of potential unrest rather than the real thing. Still this shadow clearly rattled the state apparatus.
The mysterious online initiative, which first surfaced on US-based Boxun.com, sought to emulate the revolutionary movements in the Arab world and put forward the slogans, we want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness all of which are common grievances in China.
Whether you are the parents of kidney stone babies, relocated households, retired soldiers, private teachers, buy-out offer employees, laid-off workers, petitioners... we are all Chinese. You and I still have a dream about Chinas future. We should be responsible for the future of our own and children, the posting on the Boxun site said.
Net censorship more to come
Despite massive censorship and a block on keywords like Egypt and Jasmine Revolution, millions of internet-savvy Chinese are scaling the regimes Great Firewall controls and eagerly following the mighty revolutionary tide against despotism in North Africa and the Middle East. This sympathy and excitement about these revolutions does not of course automatically translate into a movement on the streets, even inside the worlds biggest dictatorship, with its own stark inequality not so different to that which is fuelling revolt in the Arab world. China is different in one crucial respect: the degree and sophistication of internet and telecommunications controls exceeds anything seen elsewhere. Mobile SMS messages and not just the internet can be filtered by authorities to block kewords and to monitor and intercept those calling for mobilisation. Relieved by Sundays no show by protesters in most cities, official media mocked the small turnouts in Beijing and Shanghai as no more than street theatre. But the real attitude of the ruling Communist Party was spelt out by Li Datong, a retired editor with the party-run China Youth Daily: The party is very, very nervous, way beyond their normal level of anxiety.
Sundays call to the streets may even have been a hoax (some suspect the security forces themselves). Most likely the anonymous call to action came from overseas Chinese dissidents. These groupings are mostly bourgeois liberal and pro-US in outlook, and have no real connection with the spontaneous protest movements that have developed inside China in recent years. But then again, similar currents of opinion have been one of the many strands involved in the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.
In several cities named in the Boxun.com posting nothing seems to have happened, which is not surprising in itself. But it is the massive repressive response of the police and security forces to this first flicker of protest linked explicitly to Middle Eastern events, that says most about the current psychology of Chinas rulers. It is clear they have been shaken by the speed and audacity of the mass movements in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya, and consequently are taking nothing for granted.
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya have shaken some Communist Party leaders in showing how quickly autocrats can lose control in the face of overwhelming populist anger, noted the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.chinaworker.info/get_img?NrArticle=1349&NrImage=7
Massive police presence in Beijing, 22 Februar
Top-level meetings
A high-level meeting of Politburo members took place already on February 12, the day after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was toppled. This was to discuss how to manage the effects of the crisis in the Middle East in propaganda terms. Among the measures to come out of this conclave were plans for even tighter internet controls and the possibility that part of the Internet will be shut down.
This was followed by an even more significant gathering of top leaders on Saturday and Sunday, February 19-20. To this meeting all provincial, ministerial and military leaders were summoned by the central government. This is not the kind of meeting they hold if everything is going well, said Beijing-based China expert Russell Leigh Moses.
President Hu Jintao and Vice President Xi Jinping were present and sought to impress the urgency of the new situation on provincial bosses. The latter should properly understand the new changes and characteristics of the domestic and international situation, Xinhua quoted Hu Jintao as saying. The president listed eight measures to be taken, including beefing up controls and management of cyberspace aimed at perfecting our mechanisms for the channelling of public opinion online. He also reminded his audience that despite double-digit GDP growth, the economy faces risks from unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development, and warned the country is still at a stage where many conflicts are likely to arise
Addressing the same conference on Sunday, Chinas top security minister Zhou Yongkang urged officials to improve social management and strive to defuse conflicts and disputes while they are still embryonic. Zhou called for the establishment of a national database to store basic information on all citizens. This heralds even greater government spending on state repression. Since 2008 the Beijing regimes spending on internal security has risen dramatically and is now almost on a par with defence spending. It is more than the total health budget.
Small protests, big crackdown
Zhous pre-emptive approach was very much in evidence as small crowds responded to the online appeal for a Jasmine Revolution. At 2pm on Sunday, several hundred people reportedly gathered outside a McDonalds restaurant in Wangfujing, a busy pedestrian shopping area close to Beijings Tiananmen Square. The crowd was dispersed within an hour, with two men arrested according to Xinhua. In Shanghai a crowd of around 100 gathered at a cinema near the Peoples Square.
Im here to demand that they end one-party rules soon as possible so they wont be able to carry out arbitrary arrests, a Shanghai protester was quoted in the South China Morning Post (February 21). The government are all hooligans, shouted a woman at the same gathering.
In other cities targeted in the online appeal, such as Tianjin, Chengdu and Guangzhou, little seems to have happened apart from huge police mobilisations. Human rights groups estimated that up to 100 activists in cities across China were detained by police, confined to their homes or have gone missing. The Hong Kong-based Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said it had received information that universities in Shaanxi and Jiangsu had been ordered to close their gates and prevent students from leaving campus. The text messaging service of China Mobile was out of action in Beijing on Sunday for an upgrade according to the company. It has been a normal tactic to suspend such services in politically tense areas to frustrate organisation. This was the case with mass anti-pollution protests in Xiamen in 2007 and in last years unrest in Xinjiang.
Beijing human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, whose law firm represented Liu Xiaobo, said he had been visited at home by state security officers on Sunday who asked him about his opinions on Egypt and Tunisia.
I said if we dont speed up political reform, itll be very dangerous, he said.
The official media are already cranking up their propaganda response to such calls for faster reform. An editorial in Mondays Global Times newspaper urged patience, saying the government has the goal of becoming a modern country governed by political democracy. It just needs several more decades to realise this ambition.
Such promises of change later fool few people in China. Another favourite theme of the regime-controlled media is to dwell on the instability and violence of the mass movements in the Middle East, and the negative effects on business in particular. One would think China had never had a revolution. Yet this October sees the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Xinhai revolution, which ended Chinas imperial dynasty and established Asias first republic. This was overshadowed by the even more powerful revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in 1925-27 and the revolution of 1949 which overthrew feudalism and also for a period capitalism. The Chinese regimes stress on harmonious development echoes the propaganda of Arab dictators Mubarak and Gaddafi, that they are all that stands between civilisation and anarchy.
A social time bomb
This shows just how nervous and how insecure the Chinese government is, says Wang Songlian, of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. It is aware of how many forms of grievances are in society that are simmering despite the prosperity on the surface.
The Chinese leaders are sitting on a social time bomb, no different fundamentally from the situation of Mubarak, Ben Ali and other beleaguered dictators. There is huge accumulated anger everywhere after decades of privatisations, neo-liberal attacks, an unprecedented wealth gap and rampant corruption. This is the fuel along with the hatred of autocratic rule that is driving the revolution in the Arab world.
In China there have been more than 90,000 mass incidents in each of the last four years according to official data. Peasant protests against corrupt officials in league with property tycoons have skyrocketed in tandem with soaring land prices last year struck a new record of over 50,000 illegal land grabs. At the same time the gap between rich and poor is more extreme in China even than in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. The economic miracle which has become a legend of our time excludes huge sections of the population such as the rural majority.
Government figures released on January 20 show that rural per capita net income rose 10.9 percent to 5,919 yuan last year. This is hailed as great progress. But it still means that 750 million rural Chinese must eke out a living on 898 US dollars per year or 2.4 dollars a day! And this is the average figure. A minority (some millions of wealthier farmers) get considerably more than this while the majority (some 100s of millions of ordinary poor peasants and landless rural labourers) actually get less. A survey published this week by the puppet official trade union shows that average salaries for second generation migrant workers, the backbone of last years historic strike wave, are 10 percent lower than first generation of migrants earned in the 1980s and early 90s, in real terms.
The Chinese regime is frantically stocking its state armouries and expanding the technical capacities of its more than 40,000 internet cops. But if the last seven weeks or revolution in the Middle East have taught anything it is that once the people lose their fear, no amount of repression can succeed against them.
Previously on chinaworker.info: Chinese regime fears Egyptization (http://www.chinaworker.info/en/content/news/1325/?ls-art0=15)
Protest in Hong Kong
SOCIALIST ACTION (supporters of the CWI in Hong Kong) took part in a protest at the Chinese governments Liaison Office in Hong Kong on Sunday in support of the Jasmine Revolution and for the release of those arrested in China. Around 40 people joined the action organised by the League of Social Democrats chanting, Long live the peoples revolution and Long live democracy.
Socialist Action fights for an immediate end to one-party rule and full democratic rights in China and Hong Kong. We call for free elections to a genuine Peoples Assembly, based on the working class and poor farmers, with the power to raise wages, build affordable public housing, and tackle the social crisis caused by capitalism. In China, as with the revolutions in the Arab world, we fight for every democratic advance but also argue that a socialist transformation is needed to realise the aspirations of the masses.
LSD legislator Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung vowed there would be new protests in Hong Kong in support of mainland Chinese protesters and the fight for democratic rights. A new demonstration linked to calls for a Jasmine Revolution in China is planned for Sunday 27 February.
Wednesday, 23 February 2011.
The party is very, very nervous, way beyond their normal level of anxiety.
Dikang, chinaworker.info
These were hardly the actions of a secure, self confident regime. The call on Chinese language micro-blogging sites for gatherings last Sunday, February 20, to support a Jasmine Revolution brought forth an overwhelming pre-emptive show of force by state security forces. Tens of thousands of police were mobilised in more than 20 cities. Dozens of lawyers, activists and dissidents were arrested, and internet censorship was stepped up. This was the biggest crackdown since October when dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite this, incredibly, there were small protest gatherings in Beijing and Shanghai. Otherwise the event was more of a shadow of potential unrest rather than the real thing. Still this shadow clearly rattled the state apparatus.
The mysterious online initiative, which first surfaced on US-based Boxun.com, sought to emulate the revolutionary movements in the Arab world and put forward the slogans, we want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness all of which are common grievances in China.
Whether you are the parents of kidney stone babies, relocated households, retired soldiers, private teachers, buy-out offer employees, laid-off workers, petitioners... we are all Chinese. You and I still have a dream about Chinas future. We should be responsible for the future of our own and children, the posting on the Boxun site said.
Net censorship more to come
Despite massive censorship and a block on keywords like Egypt and Jasmine Revolution, millions of internet-savvy Chinese are scaling the regimes Great Firewall controls and eagerly following the mighty revolutionary tide against despotism in North Africa and the Middle East. This sympathy and excitement about these revolutions does not of course automatically translate into a movement on the streets, even inside the worlds biggest dictatorship, with its own stark inequality not so different to that which is fuelling revolt in the Arab world. China is different in one crucial respect: the degree and sophistication of internet and telecommunications controls exceeds anything seen elsewhere. Mobile SMS messages and not just the internet can be filtered by authorities to block kewords and to monitor and intercept those calling for mobilisation. Relieved by Sundays no show by protesters in most cities, official media mocked the small turnouts in Beijing and Shanghai as no more than street theatre. But the real attitude of the ruling Communist Party was spelt out by Li Datong, a retired editor with the party-run China Youth Daily: The party is very, very nervous, way beyond their normal level of anxiety.
Sundays call to the streets may even have been a hoax (some suspect the security forces themselves). Most likely the anonymous call to action came from overseas Chinese dissidents. These groupings are mostly bourgeois liberal and pro-US in outlook, and have no real connection with the spontaneous protest movements that have developed inside China in recent years. But then again, similar currents of opinion have been one of the many strands involved in the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.
In several cities named in the Boxun.com posting nothing seems to have happened, which is not surprising in itself. But it is the massive repressive response of the police and security forces to this first flicker of protest linked explicitly to Middle Eastern events, that says most about the current psychology of Chinas rulers. It is clear they have been shaken by the speed and audacity of the mass movements in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya, and consequently are taking nothing for granted.
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya have shaken some Communist Party leaders in showing how quickly autocrats can lose control in the face of overwhelming populist anger, noted the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.chinaworker.info/get_img?NrArticle=1349&NrImage=7
Massive police presence in Beijing, 22 Februar
Top-level meetings
A high-level meeting of Politburo members took place already on February 12, the day after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was toppled. This was to discuss how to manage the effects of the crisis in the Middle East in propaganda terms. Among the measures to come out of this conclave were plans for even tighter internet controls and the possibility that part of the Internet will be shut down.
This was followed by an even more significant gathering of top leaders on Saturday and Sunday, February 19-20. To this meeting all provincial, ministerial and military leaders were summoned by the central government. This is not the kind of meeting they hold if everything is going well, said Beijing-based China expert Russell Leigh Moses.
President Hu Jintao and Vice President Xi Jinping were present and sought to impress the urgency of the new situation on provincial bosses. The latter should properly understand the new changes and characteristics of the domestic and international situation, Xinhua quoted Hu Jintao as saying. The president listed eight measures to be taken, including beefing up controls and management of cyberspace aimed at perfecting our mechanisms for the channelling of public opinion online. He also reminded his audience that despite double-digit GDP growth, the economy faces risks from unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development, and warned the country is still at a stage where many conflicts are likely to arise
Addressing the same conference on Sunday, Chinas top security minister Zhou Yongkang urged officials to improve social management and strive to defuse conflicts and disputes while they are still embryonic. Zhou called for the establishment of a national database to store basic information on all citizens. This heralds even greater government spending on state repression. Since 2008 the Beijing regimes spending on internal security has risen dramatically and is now almost on a par with defence spending. It is more than the total health budget.
Small protests, big crackdown
Zhous pre-emptive approach was very much in evidence as small crowds responded to the online appeal for a Jasmine Revolution. At 2pm on Sunday, several hundred people reportedly gathered outside a McDonalds restaurant in Wangfujing, a busy pedestrian shopping area close to Beijings Tiananmen Square. The crowd was dispersed within an hour, with two men arrested according to Xinhua. In Shanghai a crowd of around 100 gathered at a cinema near the Peoples Square.
Im here to demand that they end one-party rules soon as possible so they wont be able to carry out arbitrary arrests, a Shanghai protester was quoted in the South China Morning Post (February 21). The government are all hooligans, shouted a woman at the same gathering.
In other cities targeted in the online appeal, such as Tianjin, Chengdu and Guangzhou, little seems to have happened apart from huge police mobilisations. Human rights groups estimated that up to 100 activists in cities across China were detained by police, confined to their homes or have gone missing. The Hong Kong-based Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said it had received information that universities in Shaanxi and Jiangsu had been ordered to close their gates and prevent students from leaving campus. The text messaging service of China Mobile was out of action in Beijing on Sunday for an upgrade according to the company. It has been a normal tactic to suspend such services in politically tense areas to frustrate organisation. This was the case with mass anti-pollution protests in Xiamen in 2007 and in last years unrest in Xinjiang.
Beijing human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, whose law firm represented Liu Xiaobo, said he had been visited at home by state security officers on Sunday who asked him about his opinions on Egypt and Tunisia.
I said if we dont speed up political reform, itll be very dangerous, he said.
The official media are already cranking up their propaganda response to such calls for faster reform. An editorial in Mondays Global Times newspaper urged patience, saying the government has the goal of becoming a modern country governed by political democracy. It just needs several more decades to realise this ambition.
Such promises of change later fool few people in China. Another favourite theme of the regime-controlled media is to dwell on the instability and violence of the mass movements in the Middle East, and the negative effects on business in particular. One would think China had never had a revolution. Yet this October sees the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Xinhai revolution, which ended Chinas imperial dynasty and established Asias first republic. This was overshadowed by the even more powerful revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in 1925-27 and the revolution of 1949 which overthrew feudalism and also for a period capitalism. The Chinese regimes stress on harmonious development echoes the propaganda of Arab dictators Mubarak and Gaddafi, that they are all that stands between civilisation and anarchy.
A social time bomb
This shows just how nervous and how insecure the Chinese government is, says Wang Songlian, of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. It is aware of how many forms of grievances are in society that are simmering despite the prosperity on the surface.
The Chinese leaders are sitting on a social time bomb, no different fundamentally from the situation of Mubarak, Ben Ali and other beleaguered dictators. There is huge accumulated anger everywhere after decades of privatisations, neo-liberal attacks, an unprecedented wealth gap and rampant corruption. This is the fuel along with the hatred of autocratic rule that is driving the revolution in the Arab world.
In China there have been more than 90,000 mass incidents in each of the last four years according to official data. Peasant protests against corrupt officials in league with property tycoons have skyrocketed in tandem with soaring land prices last year struck a new record of over 50,000 illegal land grabs. At the same time the gap between rich and poor is more extreme in China even than in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. The economic miracle which has become a legend of our time excludes huge sections of the population such as the rural majority.
Government figures released on January 20 show that rural per capita net income rose 10.9 percent to 5,919 yuan last year. This is hailed as great progress. But it still means that 750 million rural Chinese must eke out a living on 898 US dollars per year or 2.4 dollars a day! And this is the average figure. A minority (some millions of wealthier farmers) get considerably more than this while the majority (some 100s of millions of ordinary poor peasants and landless rural labourers) actually get less. A survey published this week by the puppet official trade union shows that average salaries for second generation migrant workers, the backbone of last years historic strike wave, are 10 percent lower than first generation of migrants earned in the 1980s and early 90s, in real terms.
The Chinese regime is frantically stocking its state armouries and expanding the technical capacities of its more than 40,000 internet cops. But if the last seven weeks or revolution in the Middle East have taught anything it is that once the people lose their fear, no amount of repression can succeed against them.
Previously on chinaworker.info: Chinese regime fears Egyptization (http://www.chinaworker.info/en/content/news/1325/?ls-art0=15)
Protest in Hong Kong
SOCIALIST ACTION (supporters of the CWI in Hong Kong) took part in a protest at the Chinese governments Liaison Office in Hong Kong on Sunday in support of the Jasmine Revolution and for the release of those arrested in China. Around 40 people joined the action organised by the League of Social Democrats chanting, Long live the peoples revolution and Long live democracy.
Socialist Action fights for an immediate end to one-party rule and full democratic rights in China and Hong Kong. We call for free elections to a genuine Peoples Assembly, based on the working class and poor farmers, with the power to raise wages, build affordable public housing, and tackle the social crisis caused by capitalism. In China, as with the revolutions in the Arab world, we fight for every democratic advance but also argue that a socialist transformation is needed to realise the aspirations of the masses.
LSD legislator Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung vowed there would be new protests in Hong Kong in support of mainland Chinese protesters and the fight for democratic rights. A new demonstration linked to calls for a Jasmine Revolution in China is planned for Sunday 27 February.