Blood & Treasure

MGI watch - Wansheng

Guess what else has been happening in the wider Chongqing area.

Order was being restored Wednesday after thousands of people clashed with police in a district of Chongqing that is struggling economically, a local official said.

The incident began at the same time late Tuesday when state media announced the purge of Bo Xilai, former party chief of the mega-industrial city, from the party’s ruling circle, and the arrest of his wife, Gu Kailai, who is suspected of involvement in a murder case.

The Chongqing official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was no connection between the two events. But the incident reflects the challenges local governments face as three decades of rapid economic expansion have left uneven growth.

The riot  happened after an administrative merger between Wansheng and a neighbouring district, which resulted in reductions in public sector pay and general welfare benefits, including pensions. These are usually set locally in China, as they will be in Britain if the government gets it's way over local pay scales. I wonder if we'll get the same response.

 

 

MGI watch: Panhe - Wukan too?

It's not been confirmed yet, but there's news of another liberated village, this time Panhe in southern Zhejiang:

According to World Journal, the Wukan uprising’s ultimate success inspired Panhe villagers to decide to hold widespread demonstrations starting February 1.  Since that time, the report continues, demonstrators have circled the village unmolested. The street demonstrations shown in photographic accounts include demonstrators waving banners with slogans such as, “Denounce the Local Panhe Government’s Deceit Of The Masses,” “Down With Corrupt Officials,” and “Reselling Land And Destroying Fertile Farmland Is A Heinous Crime.”

The Panhe story seems to follow the Wukan incident in every particular: corrupt officials, illegal land sales, corporate-Party thuggery and the eventual driving out of the local apparat. This might make one a bit suspicious, but then again the land seizure issue is an absolutely typical nexus for discontent. It may be that some of the details are different or not known and have been bent to fit now that MGIs are being looked at generally through the Wukan lens.

As we've said frequently here before, peasant self-organisation of this type is nothing new. It will expand to fit whatever vacuum is left available to it. The significant part of the story is that here, as in Wukan, the local Party representatives have left and, apparently, not returned.

Now the Wukan affair was settled when Guagndong Party boss Wang Yang intervened on the side of the villagers, and Wang's conciliatory approach to protest is part of his pitch for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee this year: he is, for better or worse, the MGI guy. As James commented in an earlier post, it's not going to do Wang much good if his approach is seen to be weakening the Communist Party's grassroots will to power; and this incident, if confirmed, will probably be seen as evidence for just that. What's more, with Bo Xilai harmed by the Wang Lijun affair, you have both of the most prominent experiments in governance discredited. 

kicking off in Wukan

The Telegraph gets over-excited over a notable, but not unprecedented, instance of local officials being driven out by popular action here.  "For the first time in record" my arse; Jamie's blogged a couple of previous instances of the authorities temporarily pulling back or compromising with local leaders before. And unless it involves, say, artillery brigades being called in to put down the rebellion, you're nowhere near your level of even 1970s Cultural Revolution action. 

Anyway, my guess is that the local officials end up sacked/having their bank accounts uncomfortably closely examined/moved to other cities, some gesture is made to the villagers, a few of them end up in jail, and new and smoother party leaders get helicoptered in from outside. 

Addenda: Jamie here. Something very like the Wukan incident happened in Shantou on an even larger scale in 2007, when nine counties around the city temporarily turfed out the local CPC apparat. Report of that incident here, B&T coverage here.

The difference this time is that there’s a journalist inside the event. See also ChinaGeeks for constant updates.

 

 

undesirable types

Can't find an online account yet, but Shenzhen has reportedly deported 80,000 "dangerous" individuals - meaning, it looks like, a mixture of migrant workers, ex-cons, street vendors, and petitioners - to Dongguan in anticipation of the upcoming Universiade. (As a friend of mine put it with regard to their anti-petitioner efforts, "Who the fuck cares about the Universiade?"  I'm surprised there's been no pressure on participating universities from concerned academics, though; this has been going on for months.)  

This was a "round 'em up and put them on the bus" affair; it looks as though it's going to backfire, not least because Dongguan police and residents are complaining vigorously.

sheep vs trucks

Xilingol continues to simmer; this has potential to be a long-runner. The Mongols in the PRC have (following the end of the long frontier war against Han settlers from the 1870s to the 1950s) - been relatively quiescent, compared to the Tibetans and Uighur, partially because the existence of Mongolia and a relatively porous border acted as a safety valve. But ethnic tensions were obvious when I was there five years ago - the Han were driving the cars and the Mongols were herding the sheep - and there's enough Mongolians who hate the Chinese that funding/arms coming across the border has to be a major worry.

"Smelly Mongolian herder," as the driver is rumored to have called the victim, is a very tradtional Chinese insult about the Mongols, by the way.

mgi watch, inner mongolia

There's been a large-ish protest by 2000-odd students (mostly teenagers) in Xilin Gol, Inner Mongolia, apparently because of reckless driving by truckers that's killed a couple of herdsmen in the last few weeks.  As usual, there's an ethnic angle; the truckers are almost all Han, and the students Mongolians. It's making the local TV news tonight, unless the story gets cancelled from above, so there may be some official action as a result.

MGI watch: Changchun

Further to James’ comment about making a lawful society happen by acting as though you were living in one, ESWN has a translation of an incident in Changchun.

A man wearing a police jacket knocked over a woman with his car in the basement of a local shopping centre; then got out of the car and beat her up when she complained. According to information, a man dressed in a police uniform knocked down the old woman with his car, got out of his car and assaulted the two women while yelling: "I've got money. I can beat you to death and I can pay my way out ..." Local citizens laid siege to the man sitting in his car for three hours. The Changchun city deputy mayor Gao Xuezhang (who is also the Public Security Bureau director) rushed to the scene to take charge. After more than three hours of patient pleading, the people calmed down and the principals were taken back to the police station to assist in the investigation.

The car was surrounded by several thousand very angry shoppers, who detained the man until the police came to arrest him and take him away. Actually, they waited until the police arrived in sufficient force to convince the now terrified thug that he would reach the local cop shop in one piece. The article, as such reports do anywhere, emphasises that the crowd was somewhat pissed off and unruly:

Several young men began to kick the red Mazda. Others pounded the windshield with their fists: "You better come out of your car. We are waiting to listen to your apology." Citizens on the upper level of the shopping mall threw snowballs, bricks and cigarette butts at the red Mazda.

Video over here. Now if the crowd had really wanted to it could have torched the car with the man inside or dragged him out and set to work on him. What they actually did was keep up the pressure until the local police chief himself turned up. It’s the actions of people who don’t have much confidence in official justice but are determined to try and make it work.

The man in the police jacket later turned out to be an unemployed individual by the name of Jiang Xiaogio. Unemployed men in official uniforms driving expensive cars is suggestive of organized crime. That may be another subtext.

what's mine is mine

This isn't technically an MGI, but same area 

Short form; two coal bosses go to war after local government rules against one, bombs and guns come into play, 9 end up dead and 50-odd injured.  This used to be common in the US in the 20s - we haven't seen full-scale wars of unionists-vs-bosses yet, though that's surely only a matter of time.

Anyway, actual shooting wars are rare enough to draw down the heavy hand of the authorities, but violence is a mainstay of the Chinese countryside.  Rural culture's highly macho, to begin with - take the bizarrre obsession with arm wrestling, for instance (not much else to do in Bugfuck, Anhui).  It normally extends only to cudgels and iron bars, though there's a surprising amount of armament drifting around.  (I'm told, though I've never been able to confirm it, that guns were all over the Chinese countryside until a post-Tiananmen crackdown, but it's still not that hard to put your hands on a gun, especially in the South.) 

MGI watch: Wuhua

Multiple perspectives on a riot on Friday night in Wuhua, Kunming City which involve two points of convergence: the involvement of urban administrators, the much-loathed chengguan, who apparently assaulted an elderly lady selling deep fried snacks off a cart: 

Four uniformed persons came out of the car. Three men and one woman. As soon as they got out, they immediately overturned the vehicle that was selling deep-fried potatos." Mr. Zhang who sold vegetables at the Beicang Agricultural Produce Market said. The old lady who fried potatos regularly sells by the roadside of the market. At around 8pm, a Wuhua urban administration car came and stopped in front of the market entrance. Several uniformed persons got out with black batons in hand. They immediately overturned the pototo stand. After some confusion, Mr. Zhang saw the old woman lying on the ground.

 According to information, the injured old woman comes from Sichuan province. She and her husband often sell deep-friend potatoes from a tricycle. "Even though the old lady's tricycle was taking up public space, the law enforcement officers should have spoken to her first instead of just overturning the stand as soon as they showed up. This was too much violence." The villagers said. "The old lady was lying hurt on the ground and the urban administrators got ready to depart. The spectators prevented the car from leaving and demanded that the urban administrators take the old lady to a hospital." Mr. Zhang said. This was how the clash between the masses and the urban administrators began. The clash gradually escalated until vandalism and arson took place. 

 

Didn’t it just:

 Suddenly, someone in the crowd yelled: "They must not be allowed to depart!" Then a large number of rocks came flying at the urban administrators. Our reporter saw one urban administrator bleeding in his head and ready to leave the scene under the assistance of his comrades. Suddenly, another group of people charged up to attempt to intercept them. Several uniformed persons turned around and clashed with a middle-aged man. There was chaos everywhere. 

Someone yelled: "The urban administrators are beating people!" Someone took a 1.5m long pole and began to hit the car windows. The uniformed persons "retreated" down Yinhe Avenue in the southerly direction. The reporter saw about 100 people pursuing them and throwing rocks, including some young women. A police car was turned upside down on Yinhe Avenue. One shield-wielding man did not run quickly enough and was knocked down on the ground by a dozen or so people. "Don't hit him anymore. He is going to die if he is beaten any further." One of them said. The crowd split and two persons took the injured person away. 

Our reporter went back towards Beicang Village. Four vehicles with the letters "Combined Law Enforcement" and "Wuhua Urban Administration" were overturned, one of them on fire. 

A social venting incident, in Yu Jianrong’s typology.

MGI evolution and management: the Pogong case

There’s apparently something of a live MGI watch going on right now across the Sinosphere, after a senior cop in a town in Guizhou province shot dead two men from the local Guo family on January 12. The policeman, Zhang Le, claims to have acted in self defence after he was assaulted by the Guo brothers, who tried to get his gun from him: so he shot them both in the head.

The incident is apparently the culmination of a long running dispute between the Guos and the Dais, another local family, caused by sons of each family courting the same woman. On the day itself, the Guo brothers had been drinking – the wine refreed to in the various articles is probably baijiu, which comes in at about 55% proof - in a restaurant in the town of Pogong when they caught sight of members of the Dai family, who had a stall in the local market. A scuffle followed, which Zhang and other local cops were apparently trying to break up. There is in fact a strong redneck flavour to the whole thing.

Supporters of the Guo family claim that they were attacked by the Dais and that Zhang shot the two brothers in cold blood, execution style, right on the public street. What it seems to be coming down to is possession of the corpses. In cases like this the authorities tend to move very quickly to try and take possession of the bodies for burial or cremation; otherwise the corpse can be used as a rallying point for disaffected crowds – at one stage, the Guo family were talking of taking the bodies down to the local police station to stage a public memorial. At the same time, the sense that mistakes are being buried with undue speed can really get people on the streets.

In this case the local authorities seem to have acted reasonably effectively, putting Zhang immediately under investigation and settling a compensation package with the Guo family of the equivalent of roughly £80,000, in return for which the bodies were given over for burial on January 16. So, unlike the unfortunate Guo brothers, they may have dodged a bullet. Anyway, more as I have it.