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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