Social unrest up as central committee's plenum dreams of a "harmonious society"
Beijing (AsiaNews) As the plenum of the Communist Party's Central Committee is meeting to discuss Hu Jintao's much vaunted "harmonious society", social unrest is spreading across China. The meeting itself is expected to find ways to slow down the country's unruly economic development and growing corruption, both of which are generating unprecedented levels of dissatisfaction in the population.
In Shenzhen, for instance, about 200 residents organised a sit-in around a police station yesterday demanding the release of a man arrested during a violent protest over a land dispute last week. Protests had begun when local authorities tried to force residents to sell their land to telecommunications equipment maker Huawei without consulting them. To counter the move, residents tried to build on the disputed land but the authorities sent in crews to tear down whatever they put up. This resulted in clashes with the police on October 2 when officers tried to stop them from building houses on the disputed land. It was in the course of this incident that a resident was arrested.
Similarly, on Thursday of last week, some 30 farmers stormed and thrashed a police station in Shanzhou (Hainan) to protest the death of a young man during a brawl. Locals accuse the police of doing nothing to stop the violence that led to the death. Local sources say that residents besieged the police station for three days, invaded it destroying two cars, computers and furniture. Two police officers were also injured. Only the intervention of 200-member SWAT team put an end to the incident.
On July 10 ten police officers were wounded by an angry mob of 2,000 people angered by the latest corruption case in Liaoning.
In Guiyang (Guizhou), one of the poorest regions of China, hundreds of people attacked some policemen and their cars. They accused the officers of injuring a migrant worker who had refused to pay a tax.
In Bazhong (Sichuan), another 2,000 people attacked police officers, destroying their offices and cars in order to defend a 14-year-old kid who was being beaten by the police.
Clashes and arrests in Taishi, a village of some 2,000 people in Guangdong province, have even made front page news internationally. For months residents have resisted their village head (elected through electoral fraud), whom they accuse of corruption, for trying to seize their land.
In December of last year, paramilitary police shot at residents in Dongzhou (Guangdong) killing 20 (3 according to the official version). The latter were protesting land seizure.
On June 11, 2005, six farmers were killed and about a hundred seriously wounded by armed men who attacked their village of Shengyou (Hebei), where a company owned by a son of a minister, Li Peng, wanted to build a power station on land seized from farmers.
All this happening because China's uneven and unfair economic development is generating social unrest. In order to promote industrial and urban development some 40 million farmers have been deprived of their land. Some 120 million people who can no longer be employed in rural areas have become migrant workers, more often than not working underpaid in industrial plants and restaurants and on construction sites.
With China's rich coastal regions requiring cheap labour, workers are increasingly becoming victims of unscrupulous employers who abuse them.
The lack of respect for the law by party officials and local authorities is further exasperating tensions and leading to open clashes.
According to Zhou Yongkang, China's public security minister, mass protests in the country are up from 10,000 incidents in 1994 to 74,000 in 2004. Last year the number was 87,000.
Every day central authorities in Beijing are getting information about clashes whose number averages anywhere between 120 and 230 incidents per day, mostly in the countryside. And increasingly, such incidents are turning violent.
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