All it took was a single tweet to send the Chinese government into panic last Sunday. The tweet, originating in the US, publicised a call posted on the US-based website Boxun for Chinese citizens to assemble in cities across the country to start a jasmine revolution, inspired by events in the Middle East.
The tweet did not produce nationwide protest but it certainly had an impact, despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in China. Saturday saw the first wave of arrests of human rights activists, lawyers and other citizens known to disagree with the regime. The detentions continued on Sunday morning until the list of names passed 100. On Sunday afternoon, outside the McDonald's on Wangfujing, one of Beijing's biggest shopping streets, police both uniformed and plainclothed, outnumbered the curious, the passersby, the shoppers and even, no doubt, some potential protesters.
Online, explosive words like "tomorrow", "today" and "jasmine" fell under prohibition. The Boxun website was targeted with a severe distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and users of social media in China found themselves unable to post photographs, forward posts or search. There was no revolution last Sunday, but as an exercise in tweaking the tiger's tale it was hard to beat.
Now, the anonymous organisers of last Sunday's "citizens' stroll" have called for it to be repeated every Sunday at 2pm. The question is not so much how many people will show up to protest at the usual list of grievances – corruption, lack of accountability, abuse of the law, arbitrary use of power – but the fraying of sensitive official nerves each week as the authorities wonder if this might be the day it does take off.
It would be unwise to exaggerate the parallels between discontent in the Middle East and in China. Certainly discontent in China exists, but for many people the last two decades have brought rising living standards and a sense of personal freedom. Given that, it is not easy to explain the evident fears of the regime. According to a study last year by Beijing's Qinghua University, the government now spends more on internal security than it does on external defence. If those figures are accurate, it offers an interesting snapshot of where the regime thinks its most dangerous enemies are.
Images of successful nonviolent protest, then, are deeply unwelcome, because they recall similar images of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and serve as a reminder for the discontented that change is possible, and that there is unfinished political business to attend to.
The suggestion that the examples of Tunisia or Egypt have anything to say to China brings on the government's jitters, but while the regime can clamp down on the news periodically, it can no longer keep the outside world at bay. China admits to 30,000 Chinese citizens in Libya, for instance, and Chinese citizens have been vocal in their demands that the government evacuate them.
With the government on high alert, it is unlikely that Tunisian or Egyptian protests will be replicated in China this week. For one thing, the emblematic square that has been a feature of this and other waves of protest – the public theatres in which the political dramas are enacted – has been closed off since 1989. Tiananmen Square still exists but it is the most closely patrolled public space in China. There are, nevertheless, some underlying factors that feed into the government's anxieties.
The stresses that were the backdrop to the protests in the Middle East were economic: rising food prices, inflation and joblessness, along with corrupt regimes perceived as indifferent to the peoples' needs. China too is suffering from inflation and rising food prices: the true inflation figure is much debated but there is a widespread belief that it is higher than the official 5%. What is admitted is that within that headline figure, food prices rose more than 10%.
Rising food prices are a global phenomenon that is likely to get worse as climate change takes hold: the impacts of droughts and floods in Australia, drought in China itself, fires last year in Russia, and floods in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil, along with rising demand, have pushed up grain prices to what the World Bank calls dangerous levels.
Wheat prices globally have doubled since last summer and they could continue to rise: demand is growing as more affluent populations in India and China demand more protein. In China, agricultural land is still being lost to the expanding cities, and a water crisis across the north is likely to reduce output further. As ever, it is the poor – who spend a greater proportion of their income on food – who suffer most. And the Chinese government will recall that the background to the 1989 protests was also rising inflation and food prices.
The tweet did not produce nationwide protest but it certainly had an impact, despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in China. Saturday saw the first wave of arrests of human rights activists, lawyers and other citizens known to disagree with the regime. The detentions continued on Sunday morning until the list of names passed 100. On Sunday afternoon, outside the McDonald's on Wangfujing, one of Beijing's biggest shopping streets, police both uniformed and plainclothed, outnumbered the curious, the passersby, the shoppers and even, no doubt, some potential protesters.
Online, explosive words like "tomorrow", "today" and "jasmine" fell under prohibition. The Boxun website was targeted with a severe distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and users of social media in China found themselves unable to post photographs, forward posts or search. There was no revolution last Sunday, but as an exercise in tweaking the tiger's tale it was hard to beat.
Now, the anonymous organisers of last Sunday's "citizens' stroll" have called for it to be repeated every Sunday at 2pm. The question is not so much how many people will show up to protest at the usual list of grievances – corruption, lack of accountability, abuse of the law, arbitrary use of power – but the fraying of sensitive official nerves each week as the authorities wonder if this might be the day it does take off.
It would be unwise to exaggerate the parallels between discontent in the Middle East and in China. Certainly discontent in China exists, but for many people the last two decades have brought rising living standards and a sense of personal freedom. Given that, it is not easy to explain the evident fears of the regime. According to a study last year by Beijing's Qinghua University, the government now spends more on internal security than it does on external defence. If those figures are accurate, it offers an interesting snapshot of where the regime thinks its most dangerous enemies are.
Images of successful nonviolent protest, then, are deeply unwelcome, because they recall similar images of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and serve as a reminder for the discontented that change is possible, and that there is unfinished political business to attend to.
The suggestion that the examples of Tunisia or Egypt have anything to say to China brings on the government's jitters, but while the regime can clamp down on the news periodically, it can no longer keep the outside world at bay. China admits to 30,000 Chinese citizens in Libya, for instance, and Chinese citizens have been vocal in their demands that the government evacuate them.
With the government on high alert, it is unlikely that Tunisian or Egyptian protests will be replicated in China this week. For one thing, the emblematic square that has been a feature of this and other waves of protest – the public theatres in which the political dramas are enacted – has been closed off since 1989. Tiananmen Square still exists but it is the most closely patrolled public space in China. There are, nevertheless, some underlying factors that feed into the government's anxieties.
The stresses that were the backdrop to the protests in the Middle East were economic: rising food prices, inflation and joblessness, along with corrupt regimes perceived as indifferent to the peoples' needs. China too is suffering from inflation and rising food prices: the true inflation figure is much debated but there is a widespread belief that it is higher than the official 5%. What is admitted is that within that headline figure, food prices rose more than 10%.
Rising food prices are a global phenomenon that is likely to get worse as climate change takes hold: the impacts of droughts and floods in Australia, drought in China itself, fires last year in Russia, and floods in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil, along with rising demand, have pushed up grain prices to what the World Bank calls dangerous levels.
Wheat prices globally have doubled since last summer and they could continue to rise: demand is growing as more affluent populations in India and China demand more protein. In China, agricultural land is still being lost to the expanding cities, and a water crisis across the north is likely to reduce output further. As ever, it is the poor – who spend a greater proportion of their income on food – who suffer most. And the Chinese government will recall that the background to the 1989 protests was also rising inflation and food prices.
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