China cracks down on rioters!

Mar 23, 2007
By Muhammad Cohen

HONG KONG - Last week's coverage of rioting in Hunan province was another example of how much has changed in China since it became the world's fastest-growing major economy and a key financial player in the world. It provided another snapshot of the often difficult transition from iron-rice-bowl socialism to the invisible hand of the market. But perhaps the biggest change on display, and the most obvious one, went unnoticed.

Domestic and international media differ about what happened in Zhushan, a rural village near Yongzhou in Hunan province - most notably whether there was a death among the more than four dozen injured - but the basic outline is pretty clear. It all began on the buses.

Villagers were angered about bus fares rising after Chinese New Year just in time to hit students and migrant workers leaving the region after their holiday visits. According to some reports, the bus company tried to impose extra charges for large bags. Others said the flash point was doubling fares for secondary-school students traveling around town.

The fare increases produced allegations of corruption, since the bus operator is a private franchise, recently awarded a government monopoly for service to the provincial capital from Zhushan and other rural towns. If there wasn't corruption, collusion or nepotism involved in the award of such a franchise, then Hunan province would be unique in China, indeed the world.

The price hikes struck an especially sour note coming during the annual two-week meeting of the National People's Congress. China's nominal legislative body remains a toothless, impotent tool of the executive branch, which legislates on its behalf during the 50 weeks a year when the full NPC is not in session.

Under President Hu Jintao, the government has played up the NPC's role as a representative body of the people to lend the regime a patina of democratic legitimacy, or at least democratic aspirations. Even when the Shanghai stock market's decline triggered a global panic - which had to swell some sense of national pride - and it was the top story on every international news broadcast, Chinese domestic and international news shows led with the NPC session.
Bridging the gap

In current propaganda, the NPC is portrayed as a key cog in the central government's drive to narrow the gap between rich and poor that has grown even faster than the economy at large.

"We need to make justice the most important value of the socialist system," Premier Wen Jiabao declared on March 9 as the NPC approved new programs for health care, education and social security.

This rhetoric and any action that follows has particular appeal in rural communities, where gains lag those in the large urban centers. And some villagers in Zhushan apparently took Premier Wen seriously.

That same day, March 9, villagers reportedly blocked a bus to protest the fare hikes. Over the next three days, confrontations escalated and expanded. At the peak, 20,000 people were involved in demonstrations that included occupation of local-government buildings and burning buses.

By mid-March, 2,000 riot police were deployed under a declaration of martial law. It's unclear whether residents began stoning the police station, burning police cars and chanting "Death to government dogs" before or after officers beat residents with batons and steel rods. Whoever started it, by mid-week order had been restored. Buses were even running again, with fares reportedly rolled back to re-New Year levels.

Details about the incidents in Zhushan are available thanks to the Pan-Blue Coalition, an Internet-based human-rights group. Villagers alerted a Pan-Blue member in Yongzhou, who traveled to Zhushan, compiled accounts of the rioting, and shared the information with the international media.

Most Western media were content to report the story from the comfort of their Beijing bureaus, sometimes supplementing information from Pan-Blue with their own local sources. But by Wednesday a British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) reporter was on the scene, broadcasting accounts of the rioting and pictures of burned buses and police vehicles as well as columns of police in full riot gear marching through the streets. Given the history of China and media coverage of unrest, it was incredible to see an international reporter allowed in Zhushan to show China's mechanisms of repression in action.

Imagine how much easier it would be for Beijing to get the world to forget the Tiananmen Square unrest of 1989 without that image

of the lone demonstrator confronting the tanks. Shutting down Western media facilities left no visual record of the final assault on the square, giving the official version that the occupiers were dispersed with minimal force and casualties whatever credibility it has.

The Hu Jintao regime is the most media-savvy in China's history. For example, it has encouraged local media to act as watchdogs against corruption. That's part of the regime's attempt to portray the central government as the good cop, whose lofty intentions are thwarted by less sophisticated, perhaps dishonest officials further down the chain of command. But the government has also seen that the uncontrolled press can snoop where it's not welcome, and has clamped down on publications it thinks have gone too far.

Whatever has changed in China, there's no doubt that the BBC cameras wouldn't have been in Zhushan if the central government didn't want them there. The story was lightly reported by domestic media, just another of an estimated 200 demonstrations a day around the country. So why let the foreign media make it into a big deal? After all, showing riot police in the streets suppressing protest is bound to anger the Western lobby for human rights in China.

But human rights in China is yesterday's news, and the current leadership knows it. Western concerns about democracy and freedom in China have been trumped by the mainland's economic integration with the world economy. From filling the maw of American consumers to financing Uncle Sam's trade deficit, the world's only global superpower and its pals need China as a supplier as much as China needs them as buyers.

It now seems hopelessly quaint to recall that less than a decade ago, the US Congress conducted an annual review of China's human-rights policy to determine its eligibility for normal trading terms (with the misleading name "most favored nation status"). Today the greatest concern in Congress isn't about China putting its citizens in jail, but putting Americans out of work.
Rights veer to the religious right
The administration of US President George W Bush has done its part to make human rights in China irrelevant by adopting the religious right's framework. These fanatics count not political prisoners but Christian church services available on any given Sunday. They care not about freedom of dissent but alleged forced abortions. With that agenda, it's no wonder human rights in China are no longer a mainstream concern.

What used to be a political story is now a business story. The political story was: Can China's government change enough to meet the political aspirations of its increasingly affluent citizens? If you accepted the basic premise that political change was inevitable in the face of economic progress, there was room for optimism whichever way particular events ran in a given week. Either China's government reduced repression, or it sowed the seeds of its eventual destruction.

The business story the West now favors centers on the Chinese government successfully managing its citizens to keep producing economic growth. In this story, there's only one outcome that works for the West: to keep China buying its bonds and filling its shelves. The West needs China's government to keep the factories working, or it will have to take its order books and billions of dollars or euros in investment to a place where the government can.

So when news gets out about villagers rioting, Beijing's policy response is far less important than showing that when things do get out of hand - as they can in any country from time to time - the government has the muscle and the will to fix things quickly. It's not about moving China closer to freedom, it's about keeping it producing for Wal-Mart.

Despite all the rhetoric about justice and fairness, Beijing is not afraid to send in a couple thousand troops and declare martial law to restore order. How convenient for Hu Jintao and company to have the BBC to broadcast that message for them.***

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is special correspondent for Macau Business and author of Hong Kong on Air (Blacksmith Books), a novel set during the 1997 handover and Asian economic meltdown about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.

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