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'Occupy' with Chinese characteristics By Peter
Lee
One of life's many ironies is that the
Occupy model of disobedient activism has racked up
more successes in the land ruled by that poster
child of remorseless authoritarianism, the Chinese
Communist Party, than it has in the United States.
US Occupy activists were quickly and
efficiently shoveled into the "dirty dreamy
disorderly hippie radical" box by political,
economic, and media elites eager to make the world
safe for income inequality. For their part, the
activists - very much like the 1989 protesters in
China - were all too eager to occupy the morally
(and, up to a point, physically) safer high ground
of non-violent civil disobedience.
Passive
petitioning resulted in little more than littered, smelly
encampments in public
parks and a fatal loss of interest and support
from the US public.
Things are different
in China.
Popular occupation of government
offices in the Guangdong village of Wukan in
response to the real-estate depredations of the
local powerbrokers was a thrilling demonstration
of people power.
The China-occupy model
spread with successful actions against the
township government of Shifang in Sichuan province
over a copper smelting project and, most recently,
in the seaside Jiangsu town of Qidong, where
locals stormed the township government building to
stop a wastewater pipeline.
A most interesting and
important element of the Shifang and Qidong
actions is the prominence of a confrontational
vanguard of young people - high school students
and twenty-somethings (collectively known as
"after 80s" and "after 90s" for their birth years)
who appear quite happy to mix it up violently with
the cops and cadres.
It appears that a new generation is less
interested in recapitulating the experience of
1989 and the Tiananmen Square protests than
redefining it, or even discarding it.
That
creates a new challenge for foreign observers of
China, especially those who continue to view
Chinese dissidents primarily through the prism of
1989, with a vision of nobly (and Nobel-y)
passively suffering, democracy worshipping, and
US-adoring dissidents that sometimes verges on
patronizing condescension.
China's
"post-1980s" and "post-1990s" generations grew up
after the Communist Party settled on the formula
of modulated political repression and explosive
economic growth enshrined in the term "stability."
That's a dispensation that many members of
the "post-1980s" and "post-1990s" generations have
no share in policy formulating, and perhaps see
little need to respect, as they navigate their way
through the demoralizing and degrading
post-socialist robber barony that is China today.
In Shifang, activists among a crowd of
several thousand attempted to bumrush the
municipal government building, but were repelled
in a police action that turned into something of a
police riot. The result was dozens of serious
injuries inflicted on agitators, demonstrators,
and hapless bystanders alike, and a marked swing
in national popular sympathy toward the
demonstrators.
Qidong provided an
alternate vision of how Shifang might have turned
out.
Asahi Shimbun's Atsushi Okudera
reported from Qidong:
About 5,000 people filled the
streets in central Qidong before 6 a.m., when
the rally began. The protesters began chanting,
"Protect the environment" against the dangers
posed by a plan for a drainage pipeline into
local waters.
But less than 10 minutes
later, the crowd broke through a row of police
officers blocking the main street and started
marching toward the city government building 1
kilometer away. The demonstrators became louder
after they reached the building.
Several
minutes later, they pulled down the steel gate
and swarmed over the premises.
About
2,000 occupied the inner courtyard, several
thousand on the street in front of the city
government building and many others in nearby
structures overlooking the building, bringing
the total of protesters to more than 10,000. [1]
The cops did not make a concerted
effort to protect the municipal building (although
they did engage in some arresting and headcracking
- as well as pummeling Atsushi Okuderu and seizing
his camera - later on).
Demonstrators
rushed in and trashed several offices, flinging
objects and documents out the windows. Their
trophies of anti-authoritarian triumph - a
publicly displayed stash of liquor and condoms -
created less of an impression than photos of
overturned police cars and the spectacle of the
party secretary of Qidong, Sun Jianhua, smiling
sheepishly after demonstrators tried to strip him
in the street and forcibly clothe him in
pro-environmentalist t-shirt. [2]
"Rampaging young people" evokes the trauma
of the Cultural Revolution for the older,
better-educated, and more thoughtful Chinese
citizen.
For Western observers, the analog
is the Arab Spring, an outpouring of youthful
anger and a yearning for dignity and agency that
counts respect for liberal democracy and free
enterprise - and the elites that profit from them
- a distant second.
The incident in Qidong
offers an insight into the dynamics of political
activism in China - and also hints that the
Communist Party hasn't quite figured out what to
do about it.
The wastewater pipeline had
attracted unfavorable attention in Qidong since it
was announced in 2009.
The pipeline is a
core component of a massive paper project in the
special economic zone of Nantong City (the
political jurisdiction encompassing Qidong) near
Shanghai. Instead of dumping the effluent into the
nearby Yangtze River, the decision was made to
build a 112-kilometer pipeline to dump the
wastewater into the Yellow Sea at Qidong's ocean
port of Lusi.
Lusi is one of China's four
major fishing ports and is near an important
fishing ground. With the construction of the
bridge-and-tunnel project from Shanghai across
Chongming Island to the Yangtze's north shore, the
Qidong coast is now only an hours' drive from
Shanghai and is turning into something like
China's Cape Cod - a beachside getaway (with
traffic jams) for affluent city dwellers yearning
for the bracing sea air and the famous local
clams.
Environmental degradation is
emphatically not on the menu, and it appears that
the pipeline project inspired a significant amount
of local unease.
It was promised that the
pipeline would deliver wastewater of the modern,
well-mannered sort from a greenfield plant with
world-class environmental controls - the pipeline
was called "The project for expelling water that
has met applicable standards into the sea" - but
locals were understandably skeptical.
The
pulp plant going up alongside the paper mill would
be enormous - at a capacity of 700,000 tonnes per
year. The amount of wastewater sloshed into the
pipeline would be even more enormous - dozens of
tonnes of water for every tonne of pulp produced,
for a daily flow of 150,000 tonnes.
If the
effluent was so safe, people asked, why not dump
it into the Yangtze instead of spending tens of
millions of yuan to pipe it to the coast at
Qidong? (It appears that the pipeline is meant to
bypass a key reservoir in the Shanghai drinking
water system on the Yangtze downstream of
Nantong.)
Public suspicion was exacerbated
by the concern that other Nantong industries might
eventually piggyback their waste on the pipeline,
dumping who-knows-what - perhaps after a festival
of corrupt permitting - into Qidong's local
waters.
Government assurances apparently
did little to mollify citizens of Qidong who were
uneasy with the project, or discourage activists
looking to push the issue. Opposition in Qidong
was undoubtedly energized by the example of
Shifang.
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