mgi watch: Guxiang

This one starts ugly and stays that way:

It was started by a hideous act of violence on a migrant worker. On June 1, 18-year-old worker Xiong Hanjiang from Sichuan province went with his parents to Huayi Porcelain Factory in the town Guxiang, Chaozhou city in southern Guangzhou province and asked the employer for his past due wages. During the process, Xiong Hanjiang got into a fight with Su, the factory owner. Su hit Xiong’s head with a wooden stool and ordered his underlings to cut Xiong’s wrists and ankles and cripple him.

The gulty parties were arrested but immediately released on payment of an insultingly small bribe, at which point Mr Xiong’s homeboys began to gather outside the local town hall. What makes this incident different is that it developed into a running, week long battle between migrant workers and local people:

“We can never let outsiders bully us!” Innocent locals getting beaten has aroused the fighting spirit of people in Guxiang. Yesterday, each household was informed by the township committee to send a man between the age of 18 to 55 to the “self-defense army.” All “self-defense troops” have worn red ribbons on their arms to distinguish themselves from outsiders and begun to patrol the streets.

Given the way that the hukou laws deprive migrant workers of residency rights and make them generally vulnerable to economic exploitation, it’s surprising that there aren't more incidents like this. One determining factor may be if the migrants all came from the same place, spoke the same dialect and had kinship ties, as seems to be the case here.

Xiong is an unusual name incidentally, apparently the family name of the kings of great Chu. Obviously, this has no proximate relevance, but there is an odd, faint echo of the warring states period. 

Comments

[RFH]

"We can never let outsiders bully us!"

Interesting to see this kind of unifying nationalist rhetoric, normally used by the government, actually being voiced at a township level.

In China, that old, tribal "me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me, my brother and my cousin against the other" mentality remains powerful. If the gov sent in some troops from another province, they might even be able to patch up their differences