China

A lot to be angry about
May 1st 2008 | FENSHUI VILLAGE
From The Economist print edition



Polluted, poisonous and immune to popular efforts to enforce a clean-up: Tai Lake is a metaphor for the state of China's politics
AP
THE plain-clothes police are always there, watching Xu Jiehua. When she goes out, two of them follow by motorcycle. Sometimes an unmarked car joins them, tailing her closely on the narrow road winding past the factories and wheat fields around her village.

Ms Xu is used to the attention. Her husband, Wu Lihong, was arrested in April last year and sentenced four months later to three years in prison for fraud and blackmail. For her, the police harassment is proof that the charges were false, and that Mr Wu's only crime was to anger local officials with his tireless campaigning against pollution around nearby Tai Lake, China's third-biggest freshwater body. It is also a warning that she too should keep quiet.

Last year nature appeared to vindicate Mr Wu. Soon after his arrest, the lake was choked by toxic algae fed by the phosphates from the human and industrial waste that had been poured into the water and its tributaries. For more than a week, the stinking growth disrupted the water supply of 2m people living on its shores. It was one of China's biggest environmental scandals since the Communist Party came to power. In Wuxi, the city closest to Mr Wu's home in Fenshui village, residents queued to buy bottled water. The Yangzi River was diverted to flush the algae out.

Amid an internet-fuelled uproar, officials promised to close down polluting factories and clean up an area once legendary for its beauty. But in late March blue-green blooms were again found along the southern shore. Such growths are rare so early in the year. Officials admit that despite their clean-up efforts the water remains at the lowest grade in China's water-quality scale, unfit for human contact, and that another “big bloom” is possible this year.




A repeat of the algae catastrophe on Tai Lake would be a huge embarrassment to both local officials and the central government. As they look nervously at protests around the country fuelled by an upsurge of anti-Western nationalism, the authorities are ever mindful that the anger could readily turn upon them too. Nationalist fervour may be helping to divert public attention away from the party's mishandling of Tibet—a remote problem in the minds of many Chinese. But it will do little to pacify citizens angered by official corruption, incompetence and negligence.

There are many such people. Officials rarely give figures, but they have said that the number of “mass incidents”—an ill-defined term—rose from 10,000 in 1994 to 74,000 in 2004. Suspiciously, the government reported a 22% decrease in the first nine months of 2006, but from a much lower base than previously announced figures had suggested. This may reflect underreporting by officials under pressure to show that their departments are achieving the goal of establishing a “harmonious society”, which the party has vowed to build by 2020.

The same internet and mobile-telephone technology that is helping China's angry young nationalists organise protests and boycotts is also helping other aggrieved citizens to unite. The past year has seen the first large-scale, middle-class protests in China over environmental issues: in the southern coastal city of Xiamen in June over the construction of a chemical factory, and in January this year in Shanghai over plans to extend a magnetic levitation train line.

For all the central government's green talk, a complex web of local interests sometimes linked with powerful figures in Beijing often frustrates efforts to deal with the problems that lead to such unrest. Wu Lihong's campaigning around Tai Lake threatened factories, the governments that depend on them for revenues and the jobs the factories provide. The anger of laid-off workers has long been one of officialdom's biggest worries. A factory where Ms Xu worked was among those Mr Wu helped force to stop production.

In 2002, after peasants blocked a road in protest over pollution in their fields, Mr Wu was jailed for 15 days for allegedly inciting them. He tried to launch an environmental NGO but officials turned down his request to register it (Wuxi already had one, they said, and that was enough). The police summoned him several times to warn him to cease his activities. But Mr Wu, ignoring his wife's remonstrations, persisted. He spent the family's savings on work such as gathering pollution data and lobbying the domestic and foreign press.

The official press—at least organs beyond the control of the local bureaucracy—reported on his efforts glowingly. His living-room is adorned with tributes: an award in 2005 from the central government naming him one of the year's ten “outstanding environmental-protection personalities”; a photograph of him receiving an honour for his environmental work in 2006 from the Ford Motor company.

But local officials were not impressed. One evening in April last year, when Mr Wu and his wife were watching television in their bedroom upstairs, police climbed up a ladder, through a window and took him away. They then smashed into his study and seized papers. Ms Xu still has the pile of cigarette stubs they left on the floor.

Mr Wu, who is 40, was found guilty in August of extorting money from an environmental-equipment manufacturer by threatening to inform the authorities that products supplied to a steel company were substandard. The court also ruled that he had cheated the company by claiming to represent the equipment-maker and seeking payment for the sale. The amount involved was 45,000 yuan ($5,940). Mr Wu denied the charges and told the court that his confession had been extracted by torture. Ms Xu says journalists were barred from the proceedings and no witnesses were produced for cross-examination.

A higher municipal court rejected Mr Wu's appeal last November. Last month Ms Xu submitted an appeal to a court in Nanjing, the capital of their province, Jiangsu. But she says she has no hope of success. The polluting companies her husband campaigned against remain open and the authorities have closed only unprofitable ones, she says. She shows visitors one alleged offender, a new lakeside resort complex. Since last year's disaster, the then Jiangsu party chief, Li Yuanchao, has been promoted to the ruling Politburo.

Ms Xu believes the national media have been quietly ordered to avoid mention of her husband. The police stopped an attempt by relatives to circulate a petition for his release (more than 100 people signed it before the police seized it, she says). Officials have warned Ms Xu not to talk to the press. A senior environmental-protection official said this month that the battle against Tai Lake's algae problem would be a protracted one. So too will efforts to silence whistle-blowers.

China

Angry China
May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition

The recent glimpses of a snarling China should scare the country's government as much as the world

CHINA is in a frightening mood. The sight of thousands of Chinese people waving xenophobic fists suggests that a country on its way to becoming a superpower may turn out to be a more dangerous force than optimists had hoped. But it isn't just foreigners who should be worried by these scenes: the Chinese government, which has encouraged this outburst of nationalism, should also be afraid.

For three decades, having shed communism in all but the name of its ruling party, China's government has justified its monopolistic hold on power through economic advance. Many Chinese enjoy a prosperity undreamt of by their forefathers. For them, though, it is no longer enough to be reminded of the grim austerity of their parents' childhoods. They need new aspirations.


The government's solution is to promise them that China will be restored to its rightful place at the centre of world affairs. Hence the pride at winning the Olympics, and the fury at the embarrassing protests during the torch relay. But the appeal to nationalism is a double-edged sword: while it provides a useful outlet for domestic discontents (see article), it could easily turn on the government itself.

A million mutinies
The torch relay has galvanised protests about all manner of alleged Chinese crimes: in Tibet, in China's broader human-rights record, in its cosy relations with repellent regimes. And these in turn have drawn counter-protests from thousands of expatriate Chinese, from Chinese within the country and on the internet.

Chinese rage has focused on the alleged “anti-China” bias of the Western press, which is accused of ignoring violence by Tibetans in the unrest in March. From this starting-point China's defenders have gone on to denounce the entire edifice of Western liberal democracy as a sham. Using its tenets to criticise China is, they claim, sheer hypocrisy. They cite further evidence of double standards: having exported its dirtiest industries to China, the West wants the country to curb its carbon emissions, potentially impeding its growth and depriving newly well-off Chinese of their right to a motor car. And as the presidential election campaign in America progresses, more China-bashing can be expected, with protectionism disguised as noble fury at “coddling dictators”.

China's rage is out of all proportion to the alleged offences. It reflects a fear that a resentful, threatened West is determined to thwart China's rise. The Olympics have become a symbol of China's right to the respect it is due. Protests, criticism and boycott threats are seen as part of a broader refusal to accept and accommodate China.

There is no doubt genuine fury in China at these offences; yet the impression the response gives of a people united behind the government is an illusion. China, like India, is a land of a million mutinies now. Legions of farmers are angry that their land has been swallowed up for building by greedy local officials. People everywhere are aghast at the poisoning of China's air, rivers and lakes in the race for growth. Hardworking, honest citizens chafe at corrupt officials who treat them with contempt and get rich quick. And the party still makes an ass of the law and a mockery of justice.

Herein lies the danger for the government. Popular anger, once roused, can easily switch targets. This weekend China will be commemorating an event seen as pivotal in its long revolution—the protests on May 4th 1919 against the humiliation of China by the Versailles treaty (which bequeathed German “concessions” in China to Japan). The Communist Party had roots in that movement. Now, as then, protests at perceived slights against China's dignity could turn against a government accused of not doing enough to safeguard it.

Remember the ides of May
Western businessmen and policymakers are pulled in opposite directions by Chinese anger. As the sponsors of the Olympics have learned to their cost, while consumer- and shareholder-activists in the West demand they take a stand against perceived Chinese abuses, in China itself firms' partners and customers are all too ready to take offence. Western policymakers also face a difficult balancing act. They need to recognise that China has come a long way very quickly, and offers its citizens new opportunities and even new freedoms, though these are still far short of what would constitute democracy. Yet that does not mean they should pander to China's pride. Western leaders have a duty to raise concerns about human rights, Tibet and other “sensitive” subjects. They do not need to resign themselves to ineffectiveness: up to a point, pressure works: China has been modestly helpful over Myanmar, North Korea and Sudan. It has even agreed to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives. This has happened because of, not despite, criticism from abroad.

Pessimists fear that if China faces too much such pressure, hardliners within the ruling elite will triumph over the “moderates” in charge now. But even if they did, it is hard to see how they could end the 30-year-old process of opening up and turn China in on itself. This unprecedented phenomenon, of the rapid integration into the world of its most populous country, seems irreversible. There are things that could be done to make it easier to manage—including reform of the architecture of the global institutions that reflect a 60-year-old world order. But the world and China have to learn to live with each other.

For China, that means learning to respect foreigners' rights to engage it even on its “internal affairs”. A more measured response to such criticism is necessary not only to China's great-power ambitions, but also to its internal stability; for while the government may distract Chinese people from their domestic discontents by breathing fire at foreigners, such anger, once roused, can run out of control. In the end, China's leaders will have to deal with those frustrations head-on, by tackling the pollution, the corruption and the human-rights abuses that contribute to the country's dangerous mood. The Chinese people will demand it.

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