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fromaustin

From The Economist print edition

    

    

Jun 21st 2007 | BEIJING AND XIAMEN

From The Economist print edition

    

    

INFORMATION technology in China is once again making political waves.
In the tropical seaport of Xiamen citizens still talk excitedly about
how an anonymous text message on their mobile phones last month
prompted them to join one of the biggest middle-class protests of
recent years. And in Beijing politicians are scrambling to calm an
uproar fuelled by an online petition against slave labour in brick
kilns.

    

Chinese officials have had reason to worry before about the rallying
power of the internet and mobile phones. Two years ago they helped
activists organise protests against Japan in several Chinese cities.
But the government, at least initially, sympathised with those
protests. By contrast the demonstrations in Xiamen were directed at
officialdom, and the slave-labour scandal embarrasses the government.
It involves allegations that officials ignored kiln-owners' use of
abducted boys to perform dangerous work. This has triggered a heated
online debate about the political flaws that allowed such horrors to
happen.

    

The text message in Xiamen, circulated in late May, called for a rally
outside the city government's headquarters on June 1st to protest
against plans to build a huge chemical factory on a site, pictured
above, in the suburbs. It compared building the $1.4 billion plant for
making paraxylene, used in polyester, to dropping an “atomic bomb” on
Xiamen. It warned readers that the factory could cause leukaemia and
birth deformities among the city's 2.3m residents and their offspring
(hence the choice of June 1st, children's day in China).

    

The response was remarkable. Xiamen has a thriving economy and little
history of protest. Yet many thousands of people rallied and marched,
even though it was Friday, a working day, and as usual hot and humid.
They came mostly from China's fast-growing middle class, a group the
Communist Party usually regards as a dependable bulwark of support. In
many Chinese cities there have been small-scale middle-class protests
over issues related to property rights. But they are rarely directed at
city governments.

    

Even more remarkable is that the protest occurred in the face of clear
government disapproval. Civil servants were warned they might be
punished for taking part. Government offices even required their
employees to keep working on the weekend of June 2nd and 3rd to prevent
them taking to the streets. On May 30th the government appeared to make
a big concession by announcing a suspension of the project pending a
further environmental review. But the protest went ahead two days later
anyway. At one point some people shouted slogans calling on the city's
party chief, He Lifeng, to resign, but the demonstration was peaceful.
Thousands marched again on June 2nd.

    

The text message seemed to touch a raw nerve. Public confidence in the
city leadership had been damaged by a proposal submitted to China's
parliament in March by senior academics that the Taiwanese-owned
paraxylene plant be moved further away from residential areas.
Previously, say residents, the Xiamen government had given no
indication that paraxylene might be hazardous. Criticism of the project
began to flourish on local internet chat forums and blogs. Many
complained that the plant would further ruin a once pleasant seaside
city already threatened by smog and polluted seawater.

    

The protests in Xiamen must be worrying to officials in Beijing. Urban
environments have been deteriorating across the country. If tolerance
for this among the middle classes were to crumble, unrest could spread.
Ominously, from the party's perspective, hundreds of Beijing residents
rallied outside the offices of the State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA) on June 5th. Their complaint was about plans to
build a waste incinerator in the north-west of the city, which they
said could spread toxic chemicals. Two days later SEPA called for a
further investigation of the incinerator project as well as of Xiamen's
urban development plans.

    

Chinese leaders have been similarly quick to respond to the torrent of
online protest—and even some stiff criticism by the state-owned
press—provoked by the reports of slave labour in the provinces of
Shanxi in the north, and Henan, to its south. A petition posted on June
7th by fathers of abducted boys on Tianya, a popular internet
discussion forum, spread rapidly. Official newspapers soon picked up
the story, describing the brutal conditions in which the labourers were
held captive and the indifference of local police. Within eight days
China's leading politicians were reported to have stepped in. Hundreds
of “slaves” were declared to have been freed and many of their bosses
arrested.

    

In Xiamen, having made their last-minute concession, officials are now
trying to track down behind-the-scenes organisers of the protests (some
residents believe property developers, worried about the impact of the
project on prices, encouraged people to take part). Notices have been
put up in residential buildings calling on protesters to surrender
themselves to police. But such tactics inspire far less fear than they
did in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Some
residents say they now want a referendum on the project. A professor at
Xiamen University says that if the project's opponents win, a new
“environmental consciousness” will spread to other Chinese cities.

    

For all their pro-green rhetoric, China's leaders would abhor this.
They remain deeply wary of environmental groups, fearful that if given
a free rein they could rapidly mobilise middle-class opinion against
government policies. Nick Young of China Development Brief, a
newsletter, says that these concerns increased in the wake of
democratic revolutions early this decade in several former Soviet
states. Although they eased a bit last year, Mr Young thinks the
government will remain cautious. Xiamen has only one officially
registered non-governmental environmental group. It has kept itself
nervously aloof from the paraxylene-plant campaign. In Xiamen as
elsewhere, it is China's online civil society that is leading the
charge.

Expert123

Umm... reading comprehension test?

stay_cool

reading comprehension + patience, lol~~~

shall be great if a brief summary is available. 

hommewang

read the first line and you know what it's saying...
But I think the topic is somehow not fitting...