Protests In China Will Not Dictate Leader's Actions
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Protesters didn't expect the government to back off as soon as they have in protests. (Creative Commons)
The following day, the government posted a statement on its official Weibo account, promising to suspend the project that triggered the protests.
“Unless you fight for it, you can never get what you want,” said Qian Wenzhong, a public intellectual from Shanghai. “Government officials never care about the residents’ concerns, and they blame the resident for keeping silence (sic). Thus, the best way to tell officials what we want is protesting.”
At least six cities broke into protest this year, most of them on the east coast. All the protests ended with government concessions, the halt of a factory expansion plan or the cancellation of a contract with chemical giants under pressure from protesters.
At Dalian, a portal in northeastern China, the local government ordered a chemical plant to close six hours after demonstrators gathered at the municipal government building.
In all six cases, government officials ran into a formidable opponent—the middle class. Though there is no official definition of middle class in China, they are recognized as people with annual income of more than 10,000 dollars.
Helen Wang pointed to a boom in middle class families in an interview with CNN Money: “It is estimated that it's more than 300 million -- already larger than the entire population of the United States. About 25 percent of the population is middle class. It's about 50 percent of the urban population.”
The Communist Party constantly conflicts with the middle class, who put emphasis on living quality and government transparency.
The group is generally well educated, having high awareness of environmental protection and civic engagement issues. They are asking to have a voice in public affairs, because as taxpayers, their money suppprted public construction projects and feeds public servants.
Wu Guan, a mom of a two-year-old boy, said in big cities, high living quality means clean water, fresh air and uncontaminated food.
When contaminated milk enraged parents with young children across the country, government officials got the nickname of “the privileged” for eating eco-vegetables grown in farms that never use chemicals. The New York Times also reported high ranking officials used special air filters in Beijing, where over half of the year, the air quality is unhealthy.
“It is a class that is dejected by the government and distrusted of the government," summoned scholars at a recent government conference.
At the sensitive moment ahead of the power transition, discontent from the middle class has reached a climax, as seen in the protests.
When the middle class is unhappy, they find multiple ways to pressure the government. One way is scrutinizing government officials.
In the Ningbo protest, social media users posted pictures of the mayor’s watch, a Jaeger leCoultre worth 1,100 dollars. The “finding who’s wearing the most expensive watch and belt” campaign online has brought down three officials this year.
The unsatisfied middle class also scorned the major news outlet during the demonstration. People collected front pages of newspapers and took screenshot of CCTV, the top-ranking TV network in China.
CCTV did not mention the demonstration, but broadcasted the U.S election and hurricane Sandy over the weekend instead.
Ningbo Daily, as the biggest daily newspaper in the area, put in an editorial about the protest after social media users retweeted its weekend front page story about a local fashion show thousands of times.
The rebelling middle class, wielding the weapon of social media, is what Xi has to deal with in the next four years. Even tough the tension between protesters and the government is decreasing, the new administration still has a long to go to make the middle class happier.
In Jiang Zemin’s decade, protests were suppressed without any negotiation between government and demonstrators. Jiang is a former president of China who was tough on protests.
When Hu Jintao took office, the local government tagged protestors as mobs while protestors looked at officials as their “saviers.”
However, as China’s economy rocketed, the protest become harder to suppressed especially when the Internet became a major way to convene people for protests.
Protesters are no longer mobs. Instead, they have begun using proper ways to express their worries.
A protest in Xiamen four years ago over an expansion of a chemical plant was hailed as “a model of interaction between officials and local resident.”
The government at the coastal city Xiamen bulked the expansion as the protest went into the fourth day and a poll on the city's website found that 99 percent of the residents were opposing to the chemical plant project.
The next leader, Xi, has remained quiet on what policies he will implement. Still, many have hope for a more liberal-minded and protest tolerant leader.
As Foreign Policy reported, "he's spent his whole career pretending he could not threaten anybody."
Coming from a prestigious family, his father is the former vice premier, Xi spent his early 20s working on a farm in a rural area during the Cultural Revolution when his family was purged. His father, the senior Xi, supported the student movement in 1989 and endorsed looser control on Tibet. Xi Zhongxun also promoted economic reform along the Pearl River Delta during his term.
The junior Xi is also an endorser of entrepreneurship and small business. An alumni of Tsinghua University, one of the best University in China, Xi sent her daughter to Harvard.
It all leads to guesses on whether Xi Jinping will follow his father path, launching reforms that will profoundly change the country.
Public Intellectuals and domestic reporters found tentative signs of loosing control on protesters at the 18th Congress Party this year. Large portraits of Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, party leaders, stepping down in the Tian’anmen turmoil are hanging at the lobby.Both Zhao and Hu were exiled from the party due to their sympathies toward students that protested against autocracy in China back in 1989. The Tian’anmen protest led to a confrontation between government and students and the use of arms to suppress the student movement. Showcasing Zhao’s photos during this once-a-decade transition is a promising sign that Xi will at least try to learn from the history.
Shanghaiist, a political watcher based in Shanghai recommended caution. “Xi might prove to be a reformer, but remember what we said about Hu four years ago.”
Reach Staff Reporter Meng Meng here.
