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The Domino Effect:: How small Headaches become big migraines
For China, latest domino toppled in the village of Huankantou on Sunday 10 April.
The Setting
While international media attention was fixed on Beijing this weekend, where thousands of demonstrators marched in support of a toughened stance against Japan, an entirely different protest was unfolding in a village in South China’s Zhejiang Province.
The scene of the latest incident was the village of Huankantou, where a group, consisting of approximately 200 elderly women, had been protesting against pollution being caused by local factories
The female protestors had been maintaining 24 hour picket outside an industrial complex, containing about a dozen chemical factories, which resident blame for industrial contamination that has polluted drinking water and rendered local crops unfit for consumption.
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"Give
me back my land. Save my children and grandchildren," Protest Banner |
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Violence Erupts
The demonstration had been running peacefully for two weeks, but violence flared when security forces attempted to suppress it by force.
Villagers reportedly overturned, or otherwise destroyed police, 10 cars and stoned security forces; forcing them to retreat into a local school. Villagers then stormed the school, forcing security forces to retreat further.
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"Villagers
knocked down the wall of the school and charged in," Wang. Resident, |
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It is thought that about 3,000 paramilitary police arrived at the scene at around 3 am on Sunday morning, only to come under a sustained attack from villagers, who destroyed or damager 50 busses and injured an unknown number of their occupants.
The total number of police and villagers involved can not yet be confirmed, but reports suggest that upwards of 20,000 villagers and over 3000 member of the security forces, including riot police and paramilitary units, were involved.
Casualties
More than 50 members of the security forces were reported as being hospitalized, 5 were said to be in a serious or critical condition.
Two villagers, both elderly women, are known to have been killed. Initial reports suggest that they were run down by one or more police vehicles.
Dominos
Far from being an isolated incident, the events in Huankantou reflect a growing sense of unrest being felt across China. The reasons behind this sense of unrest are numerous but include:
• The Slow pace of reform
• Disparities in living standards between the countryside and cities (Rural poverty)
• Disparities in living standards between China and other countries
• Disparities between rich and poor
• The abuse of workers/migrant workers
• Opposition to Han rule by non Han Chinese
• Ethnic tension between non Han minority groups
• Restrictions being placed on freedom of speech and expression
• Restrictions on social freedoms
• Official corruption
• Distant and overly centralized rule tat does not react to local issues
• Stress and disillusionment
The recent rise in unrest has Beijing concerned for a number of reasons, not least of all because the potential for isolated incidents of unrest to spread in a so called ‘domino effect’ by which news of a lax response to protests in one region might embolden protestors in another, or news of a heavy handed response might enrage others into action.
The presence of nationalist roots in violent anti-Japanese demonstrations is particularly worrying to Beijing.
Using nationalists to rally people against Japan has been a useful tool for China, drawing people towards a single unified external cause and away from domestic issues but, should nationalist elements feel that Beijing isn’t doing enough to pressure Japan, they could easily turn on Beijing. Using their organizational structure and support to form a political or physical opposition to the government.
There are also strong concerns that anti-Japanese demonstrations might branch off into their original root grievances, or that other demonstrations and causes might combine using the tactics and structure created by anti-Japanese nationalists.
Beijing usually acts swiftly to prevent groups from becoming organized, but in recent years has allowed nationalist groups with allegiances to China, rather than to the government, to grow as part of its drive to redirect emotions generated by internal issues toward external opponents.
Originally these nationalist acted as blocks, preventing cascades of metaphoric dominos from triggering a linear event, but now threaten to start destabilize things by emboldening other groups, becoming linear events in themselves, or providing structures that could allow individual domino events join together and form cascade events
A Growing Trend.
During 2003, more than 58,000 demonstrations and incidents of volatile or violent unrest occurred throughout China, a sharp rise from 2002, which saw approximately 49,300 disputes.
No reliable figures are available for 2004, though it is believed that the number of incidents again rose sharply.
It is thought that ethnic tensions, discontent with the government/government actions or inactions, and the treatment of workers, were among the main causes of demonstrations during 2004. Many of the protests only turned violent after a heavy handed response from security forces.
The during 2003 and 2004, the total number of protests aimed at Beijing and Beijing backed entities/policies dwarfed anti Japanese protests which, until 2005, rarely exceeded 1 or 2 hundred protestors marching peacefully during key anniversaries.
More riot police turned out to suppress villagers in Huankantou, a rural location any miles from the nearest police depot, than to protect Japanese owned businesses, in a central urban location, during the first round of violent anti Japanese protests.
Spreading the word
Though China’s press is still tightly controlled, and routinely attempts to suppress or downplay news of unrest, the spread of new communications mediums are making it increasingly difficult for the government to ensure that only its view on events is heard, and that large protests cannot be organized. They are also making news of unrest impossible to contain.
Many of those involved in anti Japanese protests have openly said that news of the events was spread through internet sites and through cell phone text messaging services.
A large volume of news coverage on unrest, both domestic and anti Japanese, has also been provided using the internet, with blogs and freelance news site being among the primary sources for both Chinese and foreign language news and commentary on such issues. Adding a local dimension to often distant international news reports.
To date, the response to domestic and anti Japanese protests form Chinese bloggers has greatly exceed the response from the Chinese media. Foreign language readers have also tended to favor accounts written by bloggers over accounts written by the conventional media.
ACB, good post!
I made a small reference to this incident the other day, but not in any great detail.
I wonder how long it will be before the government begins a new crackdown on the internet in hopes of sqaushing some of this news that is being passed around?
Visit me @ http://thehorsesmouth.blog-city.com
I think the government actually began that crackdown last February, when
blogbus and blogcn went of line to 'clear' their pages.
Maybe we will see a new crackdown, but I think that Beijing is more worried about the possibility of 100,000 Chines eturning up inTiananmen square demanding that the government put more preasure on Japan.
Right now Beijing needs anti-Japanese sentiment to distract people form internal issues, but it also needs strong economic ties with Japan to boost the Chinese economy.
Have you noticed how the only two parts of Sino-Japanese relatins that haven't suffered inthe last two years are tourism and the economic trade.
This sounds very, very similar to the story I reported but the town was
called Huaxi, just outside of Dongyang. I think it's the same place,
judging by this report that refers to
"Huankantou".
Same place, different name. Huanxi must be a shortened version of the name.
Simon [simon@simonworld.mu.nu]
I'm somewhat fearful the protests will truly boil over this weekend, which
could lead to long term consequences for China.
Anti-Japanese emails, many containing false inflamatory information, are being blasted around the country. Without any trusted media easily available to most Chinese, the people are very susceptible to this kind of baiting. Much of the communications suggest violence against Japanese establishments.
Similiar, although less threatening, communications took place against Indonesia following the tsunami regarding a massacre there which I'm not personally familiar with. It was ugly, but also did not have a background of escalating protest and government permissiveness.
Mitch
Great report. Thanks for the good work. I'm linking it. By the way,
where did you get the information on the number of protests?
Mitch
Its good to see that we can put our different perspectives aside (If I hated everybody who saw Japan differently from me, I would have very few Chinese friends indeed).
I tend not to read anti Japanese emails or websites, I know that there is a lot of inflamitory information on them, but trying to explain things wouldn't get me very far.
Unfortunately it is very easy to hate Japan. It did a lot of inhuman things and it is all to easy to believe that it is still in the same mindset as it was in the early twentieth century.
You are right about the Chinese media, there are a lot of 'gaps and misconceptions' because people only have one side of the story. Again, it does little good to try to fill in these gaps because doing so is often taken as declaring "you are wrong", and people in China often react combatively when they are told something that they didn't know they didnt know.
About two years ago this began to change, the advent of weblogs and increased acces to the internet allowed many people to access alterntive news sources and opinions, both from within China and from the outside world, but in February 2004 Beijing launched a huge crackdown and it wiped out a lot of this discourse. This I feel has set China back quite a bit.
ACB
There is a large protest on Saturday morning between People's square and
the bund. China Mobile sent out an SMS to all of their Shanghai
subscribers asking them to behave lawfully (read: they are promoting it and
the government approves.) Chinese friends are receiving upwards of 10
emails per day asking them to bring tomatoes and eggs as gifts to the
Japanese embassy.
Haven't decided whether I'll be there to witness.
If you go, bring a camera, send me a link to the pictures, then tell me
exactly how many of these people's parents were even born when Japan
invaded China.
The ironic thing is that when these pictures hit Japanese TV they make Japanese people behave like China was accusing them of behaving before.
Nothing polorizes a nation, any nation, quite like somebody attacking its people for things that they were not responsible for (by this I mean personally responsible rather than historically responsible. Japan certainly did do a lot of what it was accused of during the war).
Nationalists had alsmost no power in Japan until China started accusing nationalists of rising to power, now Japanese nationalists are rising on a tide of anti Chinese feelings that simply didn't exist before but have been created by anti rising Japanese fellings in China.
Any chance of China getting an acceptable appology from Japan has been set back by another couple of years. If you thought that the chances were low before, their in the basement now and when Korea gets its appology and China doesn't, this whole mess is going to flare up again.
This is a self defeating effort.
ACB
I blogged the riot too, but got a slightly different version.
I'd heard 2 of the initial 200 were killed when the police knocked over
their shelters to remove them and this was the trigger for the full
villiage riot.
I also heard that 13 of the protested factories were closed down, though I've been unable to find out if this is true or false, temporary or permanent, or for that matter why. anyone knows I'd love to hear about it....
Visit me @ http://echoes.blog-city.com
Echoe
I also heard about the two women being killed when a shelter was demolished, I think that given Chinese police tactics, they were probably inside a shelter, or standing in front of it when the police ran a car through it.
Officials have since denied the two deaths happened, but both foreign and Chinese reporters say that they were killed.
As far as I know, there were only 13 chemical factories, and that it was the protesters who shut them down by manning a road block to stop things being brought into the industrial complex.
The roadblock had been in place for about 2 weeks before the police attacked it.
ACB