Taking It to the Street in China

[unlockingsky 94]

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/taking-it-to-the-street-in-china/

HONG KONG - With another harebrained and poisonous factory project leading to more protests and bloody riots over the weekend, China suddenly seems to be having more and more Howard Beale moments. Might the country even be heading toward a "New Class" moment?

Mr. Beale, the TV anchorman in the film "Network," got to feeling angry and impotent about the daily insults of modern American life. "We know our air is not fit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat," he ranted during one newscast, a complaint not infrequently heard these days in Urban China. He urged his viewers to throw open their windows and shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."

On Saturday, thousands of angry residents of Qidong, a seaport town near Shanghai, decided they weren't going to take it any more. They took to the streets to protest the government's plan to dump wastewater from a paper mill into their harbor, as my colleague Jane Perlez reported. They ransacked municipal offices, overturned cars and fought with the police. Striking photos of the unrest are here.

City officials quickly announced the waste-discharge plan would be cancelled. Score one, maybe, for people power.

Although there are tens of thousands of civic protests every year in China, most are small-scale, ineffectual and officially smothered. But high profile demonstrations over environmental issues are occurring with more regularity, size, violence and political oomph - in Dalian (a petrochemical plant), in Zuotan (land grabs) and earlier this month in Shifang (a heavy-metals smelter). Deadly floods and a feeble government response in Beijing last week also led to a huge outcry online.

"These demonstrations represent a new grassroots force made possible by social media tools such as Weibo (China's Twitter), the messenger service QQ and online forums," said Monica Tan, a Web editor with Greenpeace East Asia, writing on The Diplomat blog. "These protests can be characterized by how swiftly they are organized and the way they happen outside more formal structures like unions, NGOs or political parties."

Weibo effect: Chinese citizens banging on the door to be brought to decision-making table. My latest in @Diplomat_APAC bit.ly/MH8Tco

- Monica Tan (@m_onicatan) July 27, 2012

Perhaps we are even seeing the development of the "Chinese street," in the sense that the so-called "Arab street" in the Middle East expresses the sentiments of those with no effective access to legal remedies or ways to express their outrage.

Elizabeth C. Economy, a senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said all over China now "citizens are making their voices heard on the Internet and their actions felt on the streets."

In a piece on the council's Asia Unbound blog, she said that Li Yuanchao, one of China's most powerful leaders and a presumptive candidate for the Standing Committee of the Politburo, recently lectured Communist Party officials that they should "understand and comply with the will of the people."

His message is one that has been often delivered by party bosses, "apparently to little effect," Ms. Economy said.

"It seems, however, that the country's newest political actors - the Chinese people - have heard Li's message and are more than willing to take to the web and to the streets to let their local officials know they are not going to forget it."

As one microblogger said of the bloody Shifang protests this month: "The government has repeatedly squandered the people's patience. It is time for us to be independent." As we reported on Rendezvous at the time, the police warned that anyone using the Internet, cellphones or text messages to spread news about the protest would be "severely punished."

Even as half a billion Chinese now have access to the Internet, the authorities and party propagandists mostly seem to be stuck in the "old normal," or the "normal normal": Deny, placate, suppress, obfuscate, censor. Crisis management in the age of social media remains a blunt instrument in the hands of the official propagandists, more hammer than scalpel.

If everyday people are seeing - largely via online photos, video and microblog messages - and sensing a growing effectiveness in their taking to the streets, the Communist leadership, especially with a major party congress coming in the autumn, might do well to pay heed.

Fifty-five years ago, Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian dissident, wrote the seminal text that first described what many are now so outraged about in China - a stratum of secretive, wealthy, entitled and unresponsive Communist Party officials. That book, of course, was "The New Class."

A university student from Beijing, Yueran Zhang, says in a thoughtful essay published Sunday on Tea Leaf Nation that public skepticism and online rumor-swapping have become the new normal in China whenever government officials are confronted with crises.

Government response to a recent deadly shopping mall fire, for example, "exacerbated netizen rumors and doubts," Mr. Zhang says. Government officers shunted journalists away from hospital interviews with the injured, and lawyers needed official permission before giving interviews.

"Those measures led to the inevitable online speculation," Mr. Zhang says, "that government was concealing a terrible truth."

"In fact, those measures had a purpose: To 'maintain social stability' (维持社会稳定). In other words, the measures were designed to prevent mass disturbance, which is now considered the top priority in nearly all government decision making."

That observation is borne out by newly published research into the government's censorship of online platforms in China.

A paper by Gary King, a professor of government at Harvard, and two doctoral candidates said anti-government comments and acidic microblog posts are not necessarily erased automatically by the censors.

"Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored," their study says. "Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.

"Negative posts do not accidentally slip through a leaky or imperfect system. The evidence indicates that the censors have no intention of stopping them. Instead, they are focused on removing posts that have collective action potential, regardless of whether or not they cast the Chinese leadership and their policies in a favorable light."

The authors suggest that trending social issues - resulting in "volume bursts" of online commenting - serve as red flags and bloody shirts for the censors. The Harvard researchers also found that the censors are astonishingly quick to respond, noting that "the vast majority of censorship activity occurs within 24 hours of the original posting, although a few deletions occur as long as five days later. This is a stunning organizational accomplishment, requiring large scale military-like precision."

+1 to the people!

[X Factor 1,112]

Regular peps have power

[Darnell 8,479]

Regular pep talks don't work. Remove the leaders money and ability to take bribes, and you'll have a different CP.

[X Factor 1,112]

Peps - meant to say peeps or people

[Darnell 8,479]

Seriously - pep talks don't work in China. It's sorta like Obama promising he'd do stuff, during his election campaign speeches...