mass group incident evolution

Roland Soong translates an article from Baixing magazine. It’s basically a theory of mass group incident evolution:

…in certain local social clashes, we are beginning to see the hint of "clashes without direct conflict of interests." Many of the persons who participated in these mass incidents do not have any direct demands of their own. They had been treated unjustly and unfairly in the past and therefore accumulated a lot of discontent. They are using this opportunity to vent their anger. For example, in Jintan city (Jiangsu province), there was a clash as a result of a dispute over financial investments. According to the investigation afterwards, 80% of the participants in the mass incident had no financial stake in the affair. Most of them were just using the incident as a pretext . Similar incidents have occurred elsewhere. For example, in Chongqing and Anhui, minor street disputes triggered large-scale disturbances, and the participating masses had no direct demands.

With the masses of migrant laborers in Guangdong, this tendency is even clearer. The most difficult thing for the public security bureau is that those people without direct demands are intermixed with those people who have direct demands. A small number of people took collective action out of their own interests, and then dozens or hundreds of people around them watched and created an uproar. The rocks thrown at the police usually came from the spectators and not from the principals themselves. For example, there was an attack on the police in the Beiyun district. It was a very straightforward traffic accident. The family and fellow townsmen of the victim surrounded the driver to demand compensation. The spectators threw rocks at the militia police trying to maintain order. One militia police officer was killed during the confrontation.

Just as the village based MGIs are broadly speaking part of a classic enclosure movement, what we seem to be seeing now is the formation of a classic urban proletariat. In pre-Communist times, this only really existed in Shanghai and maybe Guangzhou. The communists created an industrial workforce, but that’s a very different thing from a fissile milieu of migrant labourers, small scale traders, casual workers and laid off state sector employees. It’s something that Mayhew would have recognized.

The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to accommodate this class as an interest group through formal political representation. In other words, one thing China needs right now is a Labour Party, not that you’re going to get much commentary to this effect from the likes of “Flat Tommy” Friedman and co.
And of course, it’s not going to get one if the CPC have anything to do with it. But Beijing’s success in surpressing independent political formations leaves it with nothing to do but turn out the militia once the boys hit the streets and begin winkling up the cobblestones. Not that they have a problem with that, but there are news management implications. It’s one thing having news leak out of an incident way out in the sticks. It’s another thing entirely to have a riot downtown in a major city, with an audience consisting of the international news media and several million camera phones.

Comments

[Alex]

In terms of outlaw biker history, we now see the Pissed Off Bastards.