Posted by Martyn

Don’t miss this great article in the Economist about the rapid growth in the number and scale of protests throughout China. The protests are not aimed directly at the CCP, people obviously have more sense than that. They are usually due to local grievances. However, these ‘local grievances’ keep China’s Ministry of Public Security more busy than anything else.

The party’s dilemma is that much of the unrest is a product of the rapid economic growth that it is so keen to maintain. The outlook of many urban Chinese has changed profoundly since the 1990s as a result of the privatisation of hitherto heavily state-subsidised housing. Anxious to protect their new assets, property owners have increasingly clashed with developers, and their government backers, who have been trying to cash in on the resulting boom by erecting shopping malls and luxury housing. The expansion of cities has fuelled clashes with peasants whose land is needed for construction.

Some argue that these mostly isolated protests, if handled sensitively, could help China maintain overall stability by providing people with a way of venting frustrations. But Mao Shoulong, at Renmin University of China in Beijing, says the unrest is a sign that China lacks channels for people to air discontent in a more orderly fashion. Widespread corruption and an increasingly conspicuous wealth gap fuel a contempt for officialdom that can easily erupt into the kind of class-based rioting that occurred in Anhui in June.

The article concludes by pointing out that both the unemployed and pensioners in China’s poorer areas make up the bulk of protesters. These two groups would be particularly hard hit during an economic downturn. As would an urban middle class faced with huge mortgages and declining property prices – a problem that China has not yet had to face.