Revolt in China?

Writing in Commentary, Gordon G. Chang examines the possibility of revolt in China. An excerpt:

As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People’s Republic. By the end of the 1990’s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them—one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang—may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China’s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.

Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such “mass incidents”; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.

Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests—no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.