[quote]BEIJING (Reuters) - Police patrolled a central China town on Tuesday after days of deadly ethnic fighting and a southwestern county reeled after protests by tens of thousands marked the latest unrest in the tightly controlled country.
The southwestern province of Sichuan was grappling with another protest that a resident said had killed at least one when tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets in anger over a hydroelectric dam project that will flood 100,000 people out of their homes.
“It is a coincidence that we see them appear in a short time. But at the same time, I think it reflects deeper issues in Chinese society and political make-up,” Nicolas Becquelin, based in Hong Kong with Human Rights in China, said of the protests.
“There is a social momentum that is really breaking new ground … there is a level of sophistication that was not there before,” he said.
Last month, rioters in the western region of Chongqing, burned police cars and looted government buildings after a quarrel between residents escalated into a clash that was finally dispersed with teargas and rubber bullets.[/quote]
Could this be the beginning of the end for the dictatorship next door?
That would be great - except for the fact that if China unravels, Taiwan will probably suffer, too. And of course the chances of China’s leadership causing a conflict with Taiwan as a diversion increase too. :s
protests about concrete issues that affect people’s livelihoods occur with some frequency in China. people there seem careful not to make them overtly political.
My predictions are that this is the early stages of a new revolution in the PRC.
Revolutions do not happen among the poor and desperate. It takes education and money to organize and finance the damned things. It also takes a disaffected bourgeois class to stir up rumblings in those who they would use as fodder for the guns of the existing power structure.
All of these things are beginning to take their place in the PRC.
There is a growing class of educated, unemployed people who must stand in line with the great unwashed masses for their ration bowl. They continually see the job slots still go to the party members. And they see fortunes being made by people they have been taught to believe were their inferiors.
Add to this the natural calamities displacing people, growing ethnic unrest and the cohesiveness of the ecological disaster that is being ackmowledged…and you got an upheaval looking for a place to happen.
Of course this is just my opinion. I could be wrong. Or 20 years ahead of time.
