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A nervous Chinese leadership in a high state of vigilance

Leadership transition is a sensitive phase for all governments. This is especially the case with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.

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Leadership transition is a sensitive phase for all governments. This is especially the case with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. China is in the penultimate stages of leadership transition at the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, which is expected to culminate in October 2012 and its authorities are, therefore, presently at a high state of vigilance. The winds of change blowing relentlessly across the Middle East and, which have already seen the downfall of some long-entrenched regimes, provide cold comfort.

Certain developments of the past months have given cause for added concern to China’s leadership. Uppermost are the rising prices of food, the steadily increasing consumer price index and growing inflation. These have contributed to the spreading popular discontent reflected in the escalating incidence of public protests across China. A survey conducted by the Public Opinion Research Laboratory of Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University disclosed that “public crises” occurred every five days in China in 2010.

Conceding that the number of events had decreased in 2010, the report said they were still numerous. Of the “relatively influential” public crises examined by the laboratory, 18% related to the judicial system and law enforcement. Other causes were delayed payments, land expropriation, building demolition, labour disputes and corruption.

Significantly, the survey highlighted that the role of the ‘new media’ is becoming increasingly prominent in such crises and that 67% of the cases were publicised by ‘new media’. This was 14% more than in the previous year. The Party mouthpiece ‘People’s Daily’ bluntly warned of the threat of internet manipulation which ‘spreads viruses of public opinion to stir up public sentiment’.

Aware of the dangers of exposing the Chinese people to reports of the popular disturbances in the Middle East, the Chinese authorities promptly imposed strict controls on the Chinese media. Reporters and editors of major newspapers in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere were instructed to use only reports disseminated by the official news agency, Xinhua and the Internet was strictly policed. Pictures of bloody street protests and army tanks in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were banned. Microblogs are now subjected to heavy censorship while access to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin have been blocked.

Some dissident Chinese have nevertheless successfully bypassed this intense censorship and sent seemingly innocuous messages to citizens in Beijing and 26 other cities to stage protests on two successive Sundays so far. The messages were intercepted by the authorities who deployed numerous plainclothes policemen to successfully disperse and round up the activists. The authorities have additionally picked up and detained dissidents. Separately, official dailies in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities front-paged commentaries criticising calls for protests like those in the Middle East as calculated to bring about chaos. These bluntly accused “…people inside and outside the country with ulterior motives…” of wanting to create instability and chaos.

Later, in mid-February, the People’s Daily and its English-language subsidiary Global Times, said instability was caused by wanting to profit from social allocation of benefits, exploitation of others, social injustice etc.

Notwithstanding the stringent security precautions taken by the Chinese Communist leadership, dissident elements succeeded in registering their unhappiness. On February 12, a group of dissidents in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, gathered to celebrate the success of the Egyptian revolution. A group of civil rights activists in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, similarly displayed materials about Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases the demonstrators clashed with police and were arrested. On Valentine’s Day on February 14, scores of people in Beijing tried to send flowers to the Egyptian embassy to ‘congratulate the Egyptian people’, but were prevented by the police. In what would have been an unpleasantly sharp reminder to the authorities, a photograph showing the Chinese characters “6” and “4” written in snow covering the Tiananmen Square in Beijing was recently widely circulated on the Internet.

In this backdrop it is not surprising that the Chinese Communist Party leadership has accorded high priority to internal security. The budget presented on March 5, at the ongoing Fourth session of the Eleventh National People’s Congress, or China’s parliament, proposed an allocation of US$95 billion for the internal security apparatus — even higher than this year’s boosted defence budget!

The author is a former additional secretary in the cabinet secretariat, Government of India

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