How stable is China? Who will be left to beat up Mr Deng?
I am indebted to the FT for reporting a riot in the Southern Chinese city of Anshun. It is a city of which neither you nor I have probably ever heard. But this week it was the scene of one of China’s myriad spontaneous riots. Unofficial figures for 2010 say there some 180,000 of these ‘mass incidents’. Indeed that figure itself is reported to represent of doubling of such events in just five years.
52 year old Deng Qiguo died on Tuesday after a disagreement involving ‘city management staff’. This much is reported by local state media. Deng was a one-legged fruit vendor – and was beaten to death by these guys in broad day light. The ‘chengguan’, or city managers have a notorious reputation for enforcing laws against beggars, street vendors and other petty offenders.
Hundreds came out on to the streets in protest against the killing. By Wednesday there were dozens of video clips and photos of deng’ smashed body on the internet. A local Anshun resident is quoted as saying that at least a hundred protesters were beaten up by the authorities, 30 of them, together with 10 police, were reported injured.
The FT goes on to report a similar riot in China’s industrial heartland of Guangdong last month, which was triggered by the killing by the same ‘chengguan’ types of a 20 year-old pregnant migrant worker.
The authorities in Beijing have been hugely affected by the ‘Arab Spring’, pursuing an intense crackdown on anyone considered a potential trouble maker. The artist Ai Wei Wei has been a prominent casualty. The word ‘Egypt’ has been restricted on the domestic Chinese search engine. The word ‘Jasmine’ has also been restricted.
No one is forecasting the death of one disabled fruit vendor as providing the kind of revolutionary spark the death of his counterpart in Tunisia did. China’s population is ageing – not least because of the ‘one child’ policy. The vast and rampant economic growth is improving living standards. But it does raise the question as to how stable China can remain amid an economic and industrial revolution on a scale and at a pace never before seen on Earth. Has any society ever experienced such transformation without accompanying political change? Sooner or later the petty enforcers may want change for themselves, then who will be left to beat up men like Mr Deng?
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There are 17 comments on this post
These vigilante groups who think they have a right to go around excercising judgement and killing vulnerable individuals make me sick to the core. Management, don’t they make you want to puke. Idiots who cannot focus on more than one thing at a time.So what are the reasons for these attacks and what cause are they holding up to justify the lust for violence and perverted power?
I thought you said yesterday that we have had our fill of corruption . Obviously there is room in the cup for more
Quite right. Society has never increased standards of living without accompanying freedoms of expression and personal rights.
At present, it is still too difficult to get Chinese journalists, youth and families to admit the crimes of the government, police and financial services. There is a wall of secrecy in place. I do think, however, as the wall comes down, brick-by-brick, the revolution which increases and empowers the rights of the individual will begin to let western journalism and culture a closer look and to (hopefully) share information, ideas and expression across both east and west.
It’s so sad that decent men like Mr Deng have to be killed by the authorities in order for that freedom to be achieved.
It is very sad that many on here would wish us to be a Socialist state when they see such incidents as this showing the control of those in power in such societies.
Little different to those who seek in various parts of this country to impose Sharia law.These cultures alien to a free society need and will eventually be destroyed if civilisation is going to progress.
China will eventually break away from the shackles of Socialism but before it does i am sure there will be many more such incidents.It has a great internal market for its industrialisation,but to become a great world power it needs its foreign markets.I suspect the rest of the world is becoming too reliant on Chinese monies to do anything , but the man in the street could boycott chinese goods if there was a will to support the chinese population in a struggle for freedom.
No matter how much such incidents are condemned you can guarantee that will not happen.
Socialism is a concept not the pragmatic working out of it. If handled well it would be the nearest we could get to Utopia, but there isn’t any point in citing examples as I have yet not seen or heard of any Country who can get it right.
Maoism / markism are misinterpretations of socialism .
Conservative socialism is the concept we were used to. Governance by the people and for the people to use your interpretation, however because some are more dominant than others in society and bend concepts for their own use ,there is a continual struggle for power as many try to assert their superiority. Superiority/ Inferiority does not exist in an egalitarian world , however I myself have an innate feeling of superiority to those who commit these sort of criminal acts.
Our church ethos/ christianity accepts socialism as a concept and even goes as far as to distance ill deed from the person. Pure thought I say..too bad there are so many others on the other side of right . Taking into consideration that the definitions of right and wrong are a man made set of rules, what will it take until we come to a common agreement of what constitutes humanity and the living act of humaness?
China’s economy isn’t all that socialist. They have state intervention, but then there isn’t a western government that also doesn’t behave in the same way (even the better dead than red US of A). The only real difference between the mixed market economy of China and the mixed market economy of any western country is that China is mad for the authoritarian political model; western and Chinese economic models are too similar to bother separating.
The only socialism in China is socialism for capitalists. China is a freedom loving lefties nightmare, a totalitarian corporate state.
Yet, in our allegedly open society, Ian Tomlinson was killed by the forces of the State, a fact which only escaped into public knowledge due to the coincidence of his killing having been caught on a passing civilian’s camera.
The ‘denial gymnastics’ carried out by the authorities to avoid blame was a disgrace to any democracy, especially one which claims to be amongst the most advanced. It remains to be seen whether the perpetrator will eventually be convicted, ideally along with those who had tolerated his reportedly regular behaviour and sought to cover it up.
China may have a long way to go, but so have we.
China isn’t a socialist state. It’s a one party dictatorship running largely capitalist enterprises. A communist like Mao would be revolving at speed in his grave seeing what has been happening to China. These names aremeaningless when what you’ve got is one group in control of a country & wishing to remain so. The attacks on the migrant workers are as much representative of Nazism & fascism as of socialism. In its best form socialism would be supporting migrant workers & all workers, rather than being part of the authorities repressing them. Hence the UK Labour Party which sprang from trade unionism. As in Russia – notionally a democracy – countries with a long tradition of autocracy tend to resume these habits in different guises, even after periods of change and resulting from a previous regime of whatever term you want to call it. On the other hand, a democratic form of socialism seems to have worked reasonably well (& no worse than the UK) in Scandinavia, for example. So I utterly disagree with the comment about the “shackles of socialism”, which to quote Gilbert & Sullivan “have nothing to do with the case”
@Adrian Clarke
I’m not sure if you’re confusing Socialism with Communism, the Chinese government with Socialists/Communists or Socialism with Totalitarianism.
Socialism is not Communism.
The ruling party in China have swung violently to the right since the eighties (enabled by a Totalitarian approach to government).
There are plenty of examples of Capitalist Totalitarian states that restrict personal freedom.
China’s economic ambition has lead to a heavy investment in education – necessary for creating the managers, administrators, leaders and above all the engineers they require.
The hide-bound, dogmatic socialist despots at the top have unleashed a whirlwind of free enterprise – three axioms say it all: ‘money talks’ and ‘information is power’ and ‘strength in numbers’. Just as the Victorian elite had to recognise industrial wealth and power, an educated and informed Middle Class, and powerful Labour movements, so will China.
Britain navigated exactly the same changes, and for those of a historical bent, with remarkably similar policies and without a revolution.
Jon,
Well, that’s what you get when you convert from state capitalism to outright cheap labour capitalism. Sooner or later people react against the economic slavery and tackiness of capitalist consumerism.
All of it is as sadly predictable as the next banking crisis and depression.
Doubtless in the (historical) short term a selfish and cold middle class will be created in China, as in India and elsewhere. But none of it will avoid the inevitable confrontation between Labour and Capital, nor that however many small “battles” capitalism might win it will lose the “war.”
It is only a matter of time before the organised spivvery is universally recognised for what it is. However, as fascism and Adolf Hitler and British colonialism (also Operation Northwoods in 60s USA) demonstrated, there are few war mongering, criminal, mass murdering ugly lengths capitalism will not go to to keep people down. We see this also in Iraq, Aghanistan and Libya.
Eric Blair was on to something, you know. He just got the semantics wrong.
Are they vigilante groups or are they law and order in these far outreaches of China?
Unlike the west Socialism was the birth of industrialisation in China and it is the managers of the
Socialist state who are inflicting these harsh penalties on those who rebel.It is also the Socialist state which has brought about the rapid changes and increased standards of living.The vastness of the population has meant that harsh methods and a one party state has resulted in progress for the majority. What will happen now is difficult to assess.
We need to know more about the dissidents,who are they, those who rebel against the plan for progress are they a threat to the status quo.
It is difficult to know.
In time inevitably there will be changes to the one party state. Socialism has brought China into the 21st century but it is not Socialism as we understand it. They have been very ,very successful.Law and order has prevailed and achievement has been phenomonal[although the cost has often been high] it would be tragic and disastrous to see China slide into chaos. The Chinese authorities need to be very aware.
Mao welded China into one nation, seeing itself as such. With economic disparity comes the cracks in that egg. It’s inevitable and it was inevitable then.
Jon, Al Wei Wei was detained presumably because of the tax evasion issue.It was not democratic in thesense that we understand it and I do not know what type of confinement was served.But presumably the authorities were sure of their grounds. The Chinese are beginning to listen to the criticisms and surely would have not made a move that caused such world wide outcry without fairly strong grounds of suspicion.
is it a deliberate ploy by right wingers to misdescribe communism as socialism? China was a communist state – never a socialist state. It’s a good trick – used to great effect by Goebbels, etc – to build up a bogey man( e.g.Russian comunism, Chinese communism) and misdescribe as your opponents’ beliefs. It’s like the Tea party in the US who label Obama as “socialist”. It’s becoming purely a label of abuse for the right wingers and should be resisted. In the same way, people label the last Labour Government as socialist – a ludicrous misdescription of a Government so hooked on globalised capitalism that they allowed the banks the freedom to bankrupt us all. As more and more people see the downsides of capitalism – not least as more and more join those excluded from the benefits of capitalism – more people will realise that socialism continues to hae something to offer. It needs re-defining in a global age – and it certainly should have no element of totalitarianism – but the idea that people whose labour and money underpin the capitalism system should get a fairer share of the proceeds isn’t going to go away – especially as the gap between rich & poor continues to widen.
Nice juicy article, my only concern is whether the reporting is true. If I am to take your word and believe this incident really happened, I would still give the authorities the benefit of the doubt. drastic disciplinary action needed to control a huge population, but in comparison carries the same amount of punishment as in the case of borrowing a mortgage student loan.
We do all seriously need to look at China – they are a country that has been educated to violence against each other by the Mao regime and from being a country that had respect at it’s base this has been eroded so inhuman can happen and the acceptance of 1 child dictate proves this – despite it being shown again and again it a negative to family, future, emotion and when it aligns with ridding of female babies it demonstrates the underlying confusion of the Chinese as to – what is truth, transparent government, care of civil society?
@Mudplugger – agree with comment on Ian Tomlinson … and when will the one’s that tried to cover up be sacked or at the least publicly reprimanded.
I visited China recently and saw little evidence of either socialism or communism rather authoritarian capitalism. I also felt the growing dissatisfaction among some of the young student population who were politically aware and who were indignant about the censorship of Facebook and the blockage of information about incidents withing their country. (I was amazed to discover that the word ‘Ireland’ was blocked as well) How these wonderful, warm and talented yound people will deal with this over the next few years will be interesting and hopefully not too painful for them.