China urging local officials to allow citizens to voice concerns
Updated
China is urging local officials to provide citizens with proper outlets to air public grievances to avoid violent unrest as the country faces the prospect of higher unemployment amid a global economic slowdown.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: John Lee, author and visiting fellow at the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies in Australia
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SEN LAM: John Lee, is social unrest in China on the rise or is it simply because there's much more freedom for the media to report on these incidents?
JOHN LEE: I think it's actually on the rise in terms of absolute numbers. The last government figures that we have were from 2005 and it was reported that there were 87,000 instances of mass unrest during that year. Now that's grown from a couple of thousand in 1998, 1999, so certainly on the rise. I don't think it's just a function of increased media reporting.
SEN LAM: So what do you account, how do you account for this bolder environment, if you like, that people are not shy about taking to the streets to voice their grievances?
JOHN LEE: Yeah. Most of these instances are not about political reform. I would like to emphasise that, but they are about expressing frustrations. Most of these frustrations arise from either instances of corruption, mainly by local officials. There are instances of workers not being paid and just as you mention, whenever workers are laid off that tends to lead to a spike in unrest.
SEN LAM: So what do you make of Beijing's call to local authorities, provincial governments, to provide more outlets to air public grievances? Do you think that instruction might be carried out at the local level?
JOHN LEE: I don't think the instructions will be carried out faithfully for the reason that Beijing has very little control over what the local authorities do. As far as Beijing's concerned, Beijing likes to abdicate a case by case basis tactical line of trying to take the fuel out of any unrest. Now sometimes this involves taking a softer line and sometimes involves taking the harder line. The main problem with, the main problem for Beijing is that it actually assumes a high level of competency in terms of unrest management from local officials which sometimes just isn't there.
SEN LAM: And historically China, you know, whole dynasties in China have been known to be overthrown because the people don't have enough food because of unhappiness on the ground. Do you think the Chinese Communist Party is learning from history here that they see the need to actually keep the people happy?
JOHN LEE: They are learning from history but the Communist Party looks more to Tiananmen as a model compared to ancient China and what Tiananmen taught them was that unrest in a city is a lot more serious than unrest in the countryside. The current economic crisis is very serious for China. Most of the unrest I spoke about before occurred in the countryside, the rural regions. We're starting to see a lot more unrest in the cities and that's a lot more dangerous for the ruling party, largely because unrest in the cities tends to escalate and they tend to be much more organised.
SEN LAM: It does seem, though, that the Chinese central government has more or less realised that people are more upset about social issues yet local governments have failed to introduce change or reforms. Why is this so? Why is it so hard for the centre to govern the provinces?
JOHN LEE: Well, it's largely a size thing, not just geographical but just the size of China's population itself. I mean China's 1.3 billion. There are largely,there are roughly 35 to 40 million local officials running China compared to a handful of central authorities. China, for example has 770,000 townships, it has around 54,000 counties. You know, that's a very large region for central authorities to govern, which they simply can't. So it's really up to the local authority. The local authorities largely are unaccountable and that's part of the problem.
