Protest in China

Post-Olympic stress disorder
Sep 11th 2008 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

The games over, time to hit the streets


IN BEIJING’S eastern suburbs, the end of the Olympics last month emboldened hundreds of residents to take their grievances to the streets. The government was claiming that the city’s air was cleaner for the Olympics than it had been in a decade. But stench from a waste-disposal plant was smothering their homes. Freed from Olympic constraints, they felt it was time to protest. They were not alone. After a lull, news of protests around China about all sorts of issues is again trickling out.

The authorities take a dim view of protests at the best of times. During the Olympics they were particularly anxious to keep the disgruntled out of sight. And many citizens themselves wanted the games to go smoothly. A handful of foreigners staged protests in Beijing, but none involving Chinese was reported. Those who applied for permission to protest were persuaded by police to change their minds, sometimes menacingly.

But residents of middle-class apartment compounds with odd-sounding names such as Berlin Symphony, Apple Pie and New Sky Universe were quick to test the post-Olympic waters. On August 30th hundreds gathered at an intersection near where they lived. Many wore masks to show their disgust for the fumes that sometimes emanate from Gaoantun, a large landfill waste-dump and now the site of China’s biggest waste-fuelled thermal power plant, an important Olympic project. Top officials attended its opening a few days before the games.

The protesters held up lorries heading for the plant. Nervous policemen watched. One held up a black banner calling on the chanting demonstrators to stop their “illegal behaviour” immediately. There were no reports of arrests, but residents say one man who attempted to sell T-shirts with protest slogans on them near Berlin Symphony on September 3rd was detained for several hours. He was accused of not having a trading licence.

Unusually, on September 4th, the local government apologised to residents and said it hoped the bad air could be cleared up within 20 days. Residents are sceptical, but only a hundred or so turned up at a demonstration a couple of days later. Some say they are worried about police retaliation. The Paralympics are under way in Beijing and do not end until September 17th, so the authorities are still edgy.

Elsewhere, however, there are signs that officials are beginning to turn their attention to problems they had shunted aside for the sake of preserving Olympic calm. In the southern province of Yunnan two senior officials have been sacked and two others reprimanded for their alleged mishandling of a riot in July involving rubber farmers in the remote county of Menglian on the border with Myanmar.

The government has also admitted for the first time that shoddy construction was partly to blame for the collapse of schools in the earthquake in Sichuan province in May that killed at least 69,000 people, including thousands of schoolchildren. In the build-up to the games, Sichuan officials tried to silence angry parents. Police broke up their protests, tried to stop journalists meeting them and blocked them from going to Beijing to air their complaints.

Officials had good reason to worry that protests might get out of hand. Liaowang, a magazine published by China’s government news agency Xinhua, reported this week that more than 90,000 “mass incidents” took place in 2006, up from 87,000 the previous year. The numbers, it said, had kept on rising, reflecting a rise of resentment at the grassroots level that “should not be underestimated.”

The Olympic hiatus (in Beijing at any rate—elsewhere news of protests may simply have been suppressed) is likely to be temporary. In Jishou in the southern province of Hunan on September 3rd and 4th thousands of people protested about a property company they said had cheated them of their money. They blocked roads and a train station and clashed with police.

With the games over, more debate is starting to surface in the Chinese press about the 30th anniversary in December of the launch of the country’s “reform and opening” policies. Some intellectuals have been arguing that China should begin paying much more attention to political reform and allow greater democracy. China News Weekly, a Beijing magazine, said that since the games senior officials and scholars had rapidly shifted their attention to internal matters such as how to deal with “complex” economic problems and, “even more importantly”, where to take reform in order to ensure long-term prosperity and stability.

In recent days Chinese newspapers have been abuzz with reports about a speech given in late August by Hunan’s Communist Party chief, Zhang Chunxian. He said “power should be returned to the people.” That, however, seems unlikely.