Chap 8 The Coming China Wars Serialization

China's Chaotic "Wars from Within"—The Dragon Comes Apart at the Seams

Team,

The fact the China has remained in one piece lo these many years is testimony to the depth of its repression.

Peter

8. China's Chaotic "Wars from Within"—The Dragon Comes Apart at the Seams

Predatory officials rob farmers of their lands, forcibly evict residents from their homes, and cover up extravagant abuses of power—typically embezzlement, but also rape and murder. These officials close their eyes to labor exploitation and condone or profit from criminal rackets, human trafficking, and illegal mining. There is even a term in Chinese for local officials who collude with criminal gangs: "black umbrellas." With no avenues to seek redress, China's citizens are abused and exploited on a shocking scale. The problems are not confined to small towns or rural areas: Recent prominent corruption cases include the police chief of Shenyang in Liaoning province, the party secretary of Shanghai, and the head of the national Food and Drug Administration.
—Nicholas Bequelin, Human Rights Watch

In glorifying the peasant revolution that brought him and his communist cadres to power, Mao Zedong once famously noted, "A single spark can start a prairie fire." In today's China, that single spark of Mao's day has now been replaced by a cascade of fireballs. Over the past decade, the number of protests, riots, and strikes in China has risen to nearly 100,000 annually. What is perhaps most alarming to the Chinese government about these emerging "wars from within" is the diversity of their causes and their broad geographic sweep.

Across the broad expanse of China, peasants with pitchforks are protesting illegal land seizures, forced evictions, a crushing tax burden, rampant government corruption, and the transformation of their once-idyllic lands into polluted cancer factories. China's workers are revolting over everything from slave-labor conditions and stolen wages to the most dangerous working conditions in the world. Tens of millions of castoff senior citizens are rising up against the loss of their pensions and the outrageous cost of health care. Meanwhile out in China's wild west, ethnic tensions are boiling over into armed conflict.

For all these reasons, none of The Coming China Wars outside China's borders are likely to be as sudden, wrenching, and violent as China's wars from within. What the Chinese government fears most is that any one of these increasingly intense domestic conflicts may spark a revolution that topples their teetering government and triggers a descent into chaos. Consider this small sampling of confrontations over the past several years:

· In a protest against excessive taxes, a peasant woman from the town of Xianqio in Guangdong Province on China's southern coast refuses to pay a bridge toll. After she is badly beaten, villagers surround the toll station and torch it. They are soon joined by a crowd numbering close to 30,000. A thousand police officers use tear gas to dispel the rioters, a man is crushed to death by a fire truck, seven firefighters are injured, and 17 people are arrested.

· In Xianyang City, in central China's Shaanxi Province, more than 6,000 workers strike after a textile factory is privatized; and the new owner seeks to fire and then rehire them as "inexperienced workers" at much lower wages without their accrued retirement or medical benefits.

· In the city of Chizhou, just 250 miles southwest of Shanghai, a student on a bicycle collides with the Toyota sedan of a wealthy businessman whose bodyguards callously kick and beat the student. Fueled by cell phones and instant messaging, this encounter mushrooms into a "rich versus poor" conflict involving more than 10,000 people. The Toyota and a police car are smashed, and a supermarket owned by another wealthy businessman is looted.

· A similar incident occurs in Wanzou City, a town near the Chongqing municipal area crammed with thousands of unemployed workers and a quarter of a million peasants dislocated by the Three Gorges Dam project. After a wealthy local government official assaults a lowly street porter, more than 10,000 people go on a rampage, looting government buildings and torching a police car.

· In Sichuan, a province as large as France and bordered by the Tibetan Plateau, tens of thousands of farmers in Hanyuan county clash with the People's Armed Police when their land is seized for a hydro-electric plant, and they are given what even a local official acknowledges is "compensation too low to accept."

· More than a thousand miles away in Henan Province in China's rustbelt heartland, a seething ethnic clash between Muslim Hui and Chinese Han peasants leave more than 100 dead after a bloody fight with farm tools.

Peasants with Pitchforks

In a very short time, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants, and evil gentry into their graves.
—Mao Zedong, 1927

Almost 60% of the Chinese population is involved in agriculture, the average farmer's yearly income is a mere $400, and the vast majority of peasant families have only very small plots on which to eke out a very tough living. Because of the more than half a billion peasants in China and the harsh conditions they face, no specter is more chilling to the central government in Beijing than a peasant-led rebellion.

Despite their fear of a peasant revolt, China's Communist Party leadership has done little to quell rising peasant tensions. Instead, myopic, venal, and often incompetent Communist Party bureaucrats and functionaries have done much to fuel peasant discontent through forced evictions, a crushing tax burden, rampant and flagrant corruption, and an utter disregard for the environment in which farmers must scratch out their meager livings.