April 16th, 2005

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Politics
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Big Trouble in China

I´m not sure how much coverage this incident got in North America, but it was on the front page of the The Guardian yesterday. A tiny Chinese in Zhejiang province rioted against the local government, driving off more than 1000 riot police and sending 30 of them to the hospital:

Huankantou village is at the crest of a wave of anarchy that has seen millions of impoverished farmers block roads and launch protests against official corruption, environmental destruction and the growing gap between urban wealth and rural poverty.

This (perhaps coincidentally) coincides with a second weekend of widespread anti-Japanese protests. With this rising tide of discontent and Beijing´s hard-line response, is another Tiananmen Square a possibility?

Comments: 4 Responses so far

J
April 16th, 2005
2:36 pm

I hope these guys will be okay. I forsee them being wiped out, the government sending ten-fold riot police to crush them.

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Dean
April 17th, 2005
8:47 am

I’d be pretty certain that these incidents are far more numerous than we hear about in the west.

Without condoning the brutality of the Chinese regime, I have to say that I think they have liberalized about as fast as they reasonably can under the circumstances. I’m not sure whether they are doing so because they feel they are being forced to, or if they (the ruling class) are doing so because they genuinely want a more liberal, open China.

It doesn’t matter, really, why they’re doing it. They are doing it, and they’re doing it the way that they MUST do it, in a gradual way. They have the example of the former Soviet Union to look to to see what happens when a totalitarian regime breaks up suddenly.

I think China will continue on this path. I think that there will continue to be brutal repressions, but that those repressions will be fewer and less brutal as time goes on and China opens up.

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Ian Bruk
April 17th, 2005
10:22 am

I find it curious and would be interested in your thoughts that most times writers use the word “anarchy” in a negative way. In fact when you read about anarchy it seems almost to mirror the weblog/open software movement. From the first definition of anarchy in Wikipedia: In the first meaning of “absence of political authority”, an anarchy can refer to a theoretical or actual society based on the principles of one or more strains of the political theory anarchism, which advocates that all forms of government and hierarchical authority be abolished.

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Arden Wiebe
April 17th, 2005
11:30 am

Can another word be coined for wide-spread antidisastablishmentatarianism ? Speaking from the last comment a little anarchy becomes a positive element of checks and balances when applied to the Internet. “Stumble Upon” a site one day to see what online-anarchy is. The present status-quo of multi-national conglomerations in relation to the exisitng online demographics in North America becomes somewhat of a coup waiting to happen. Crushing authoritarianism at any time beggs for rebellion.

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