Quelling The Unrest
Beijing detests and fears 'disturbances'. It looks, above all, for harmony among its people. With harmony everyone gets along, behaves themselves, does the expected so the economy can hum along and trade continue to build China into the most powerful producing juggernaut in the world. China does not appreciate being embarrassed by its own.That there are agitators who complain and word gets out to the world at large is an extreme offence to Chinese authority.
Of course it is difficult, to say the very least, to administer in a fair and just and even-handed way, an immense population of well over a billion people, in a geographic area that is itself hugely varied. Beijing is well aware of its responsibilities to all those 1.3-billion-and-growing people with the burgeoning youth demographic all of whom will be looking for employment.
Making it imperative that production and trade chug along by whatever means possible.
China's bureaucracy and its government are well recognized for their stern views on the peoples' responsibilities to the state and the good of the country's advancement. Slightly less concerned about the state's responsibilities to the people and their commitment - or slight lack of it - to succoring human rights. It's not just the environmental degradation that impairs peoples' health.
There's also all the short cuts, the inferior materials and workmanship that leave people vulnerable to disastrous fall-outs when catastrophic natural events occur when public buildings like schools collapse and extinguish the lives of children in an official one-child-per-family state. It's the pollution from the manufacture of paints and chemicals that make scarce potable water unsafe to use.
It's the use of heavy metals in paints used to decorate children's toys and in the production of children's jewellery. It's the plastic extenders used in milk products that impairs the health of children and sometimes kills them. It's the blind eye that is sometimes turned by the authorities to the enslavement of the poor and the young through abductions, used in some industries.
And it's the denial of the right to be a Tibetan, not a Chinese, to practise religious rites that have great traditional heritage and cultural meaning. It's also the fact that the government can uproot thousands upon thousands of subsistence farmers from their traditional lands and relocate them to non-arable land because of the imperative seen by the state to build the world's largest dam called the Three Gorges.
And sometimes Chinese get very upset about the circumstances of their lives as they migrate to the cities in their desperate search for work. And occasionally they become staunchly anti-government when authorities decide to confiscate land by seizing it and selling it off to enrich state coffers. Which has occurred in Wukan in Guangdong province.
Where the 20,000 villagers have protested land seizure and sale, and the concomitant brutalities visited upon them by police responding to their popular protests. And finally, by arresting a village butcher who represented the villagers' interests in negotiations with the government, and who just happened to die, at age 43 of "cardiac failure" while in police custody.
"He didn't commit any crime. He was just a negotiator speaking with the government, trying to get our land back. He was defending farmers' rights. We're very pained and angry at his death."
Thousands of riot police have surrounded the town. Food and water supplies have been cut off. This, in a masterful attempt to quell the unrest.
Labels: China, Conflict, Heritage, Human Relations, Human Rights
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, December 13, 2011
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