Every day of the year, according to Chinese government figures, “mass incidents” occur all over the country, usually involving some sort of confrontation between the authorities and ordinary citizens. Although there is considerable debate about what exactly constitutes a “mass incident,” even senior government officials concede that there is considerable social unrest in the country. That’s hardly surprising considering the pace of change, both economically and socially and the creation of large groups of marginalized citizens. But it’s also symptomatic of a fundamental –though by no means fatal– flaw in China’s system of governance that will haunt it for years to come.
The latest outbreak of mass rioting occurred over the weekend in a town called Weng’an in Guizhou Province. It isn’t clear exactly what happened (see here at the eastwestnorthsouth blog for various accounts and here (proxy needed in China) for video clips), but Up to 10,000 people were involved in the protests, which were sparked by the alleged rape and murder of a 15 year old student by someone who was related to local Party officials. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what lay behind this incident. What counts is that it happened at all at a time when Beijing is extremely anxious to limit such protests ahead of the Olympics, an indication of just how rampant such occurrences are. It was a typical scenario, especially in remote and poor areas of the country (Guizhou is China’s poorest province): enraged citizenry’s long suppressed anger at local officials suddenly exploding into violent protests after a particularly galling example of corruption/nepotism or similar.
Senior leaders in Beijing are constantly stressing the need to fight corruption and preserve stability, something that obviously goes to the heart of this latest eruption. But in reality, the central government can’t –and more importantly won’t –do much about the vast majority of these sorts of incidents. The cost to Beijing of intervening in such disputes would be extremely high and the likelihood of a successful housecleaning of corrupt cadres very low as local officials would close ranks against the outsiders from the capital. As we’ve said repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, Beijing’s reach in the provinces is severely limited, a situation that is unlikely to change anytime in the near future. Having devolved power to the provinces as part of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policies, there is virtually no chance it can reassert its authority short of imposing martial law on the province and shooting a whole bunch of corrupt officials, the likelihood of which is zero. An in fact, in the cold calculus of power, most these incidents can be safely ignored as they are by nature self-limiting and often take place in poor and remote places. There will be a flutter on the internet for a while, the local authorities will crack down and and then the incident will be forgotten. So somewhat counter-intuitively, what appears to be worsening social disorder can continue for a surprisingly long time without causing serious national fissures. The major exception of course are big environmental disasters. As we’ve already seen in Xiamen and Shanghai and Chengdu (pre-earthquake; now overshadowed), the not-in-my-backyard sentiment is growing and emboldening ordinary citizens to demonstrate to make their feelings known. But as the Xiamen incident showed, the Party is already demonstrating it knows these are a different class of protests and have to be handled much more carefully.
There is of course one simple way to control corruption and make officials accountable: accountability through local elections. wouldn’t bet the farm (or a single potato for that matter) on that happening soon either.
