美 Mei - Zhong 中 關 Guan - Xi 系

Every County is Weng’an
每一个县都是瓮安

By Xu Zhiyong
许志永

Original Publication:
The Open Constitution Initiative
公盟
http://www.gongmeng.cn/en/

Translation by Anton Lee Wishik II for Mei-Zhong Guanxi

On June 28th, due to the death of a middle school student and the persecution of her family, tens of thousands of people in Weng’an county, Guizhou province participated in the sudden explosion of an uprising ‘incident.’  Although the Weng’an incident seemed extremely incidental, there was an internal element of inevitability not only in the conflict between the government and the people of Weng’an, but at the same time also in an explosive connection with China’s problems.

What is noteworthy is that according to a report in the Guizhou Daily, during the uprising the county committee and county government were besieged and the public security building was set on fire, causing the provincial party secretary and local public figures to hold an informal discussion in which “county representatives and county CPPCC members eagerly made statements demanding that in succession, the party committee and government must seriously punish the subversive elements and maintain societal stability and harmony.”  However, what was left out of the report was a statement on the circumstances of “an organizational meeting including old cadres, representatives of the masses, individuals from industry and commerce, middle school students, teachers, and other eyewitnesses who were participating in a conference of the masses.”  Thus, from this report it can be seen that a deep fault-line was already appearing between the bureaucratic hierarchy of the People’s Congress and CPPCC on the one hand and public citizens across the social stratum on the other.

In order to express a kind of public indignation, tens of thousands of ‘those with no related interest at stake’ suddenly and explosively participated in a form of uniquely Chinese ‘group incident.’  The background for this is the long-term repression of feelings of dissatisfaction with society, and the reason why these feelings accumulate is because of China’s unique power system.  In the ‘only above’ system in which authority only has a duty to those above and no duty to those below, local officials almost never consider whether or not the people are satisfied or whether society is just.  They only consider their own position within the government, and in their view, the most important thing is that their superiors are satisfied.  For them, directives from above are of the highest value.  When the people encounter injustice, of course the administration of justice cannot become a base of righteousness and the people’s representatives cannot make decisions for the people.  For in this kind of power system, the people basically have just one path – seeking an audience with higher authorities.  But even this path is becoming more and more of a dead-end.  Receiving a written reply from the higher authorities and returning home is nearly useless.  From the news and public opinion, it seems that a song and dance of peace and prosperity in society is being promulgated.  But in private, Chinese people will mostly just complain when discussing politics.  This is a society seriously lacking in justice, and a society within which an immense crisis is being concealed.

Since 2000, the number of group incidents in Chinese society has risen each year. However, 2007 was somewhat mild as represented by the government’s relatively moderate handling of the Chongqing ‘nail house’ incident(1)  and the Xiamen PX incident(2).  This gave the people in society increased hope, and thus the increase in societal conflicts slowed that year.  However, with the beginning of 2008, ‘stability over everything’ once again became the lofty rhetoric, and thus, all kinds of social conflicts once again began to accumulate.  In certain places, explosions were inevitable.  Whether the point of explosion was Weng’an, Guizhou; Tianmen, Hubei; Wanzhou, Chongqing; or Chizhou, Anhui; the places were different, but the logic was the same.

In a broader sense, the county secretary of Xifeng county, Liaoning province having a reporter arrested in Beijing(3), the tens of thousands of group incidents each year, the tens of thousands gathering in Beijing to seek an audience with higher authorities, the emergence one after another of murdered corpses from all over, and more and more news of city management killing people, these are all logical and inevitable results.  This is the result of the fact that power does not lie in the people’s choices, power only has a duty to higher authorities and not to the people, society lacks fairness and justice, and the long-term oppression of the people.

Regarding the Weng’an incident, the determination of what happened and how it was handled, as well as media disseminations not only injured the people of Weng’an, but at the same time also injured China’s general populace.  Due to the fact that among the indignant masses there were some who had once used drugs or committed a crime, all of the people were labeled drug users and prisoners who had been released from labor camps, and the incident turned into smashing, beating, and burning.  Consequently, the central authorities had been kidnapped by the local bureaucracy, and what had originally been a local incident became a threat to the Communist party and a threat to the power of the central authorities.  In 2008, this kind of incident has risen up more than once.

At about the same time as the Weng’an incident, in order to welcome the Olympics, across the country a new round of projects was carried out in which county secretaries received many of those seeking an audience with higher authorities.  However, it was still a case of treating the symptoms and not the disease, and it was still a case of power being bestowed from above.  In August 2008, when the last slogan China can use to solidify popular feeling has been exhausted, where will China look to?  Will it continue to overpower everything until it collapses, or will it begin genuine political reform and establish genuine democracy, rule of law, and fairness and justice in society?  All Chinese people who feel a responsibility to their nation should seriously consider this issue.

Note: This is a translation I did from a Chinese source and is provided for informational purposes only, not to express my own views.  To contact the author or original publication, please check the details listed above.

My endnotes, not the author’s:

1. This refers to an incident in Chongqing in which a local homeowner refused to sell their house to make way for development.  Source: International Herald Tribune
2. This refers to an incident in Xiamen in which local residents protested against the planned construction of a PX chemical factory close to their homes.  The construction of the factory was eventually put on hold.
3. Source: The Washington Post

Related Posts

• An Article on the Incident in Weng’an, Guizhou
• The Origins of Communal Unawareness