HOW HE SEES IT As unrest grows, China gets tough

By DANIEL SNEIDER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Beneath the glitter and bustle of China's economic boom, discontent spreads like cracks in cement. Unrest surges, under the West's radar screen.
According to official Chinese police documents, recently acquired by a RAND analyst, there were 56,000 incidents of public protest last year. The protests range from small groups complaining about corrupt local officials to wildcat strikes involving thousands, even tens of thousands, of people.
The Chinese communist government struggles with that challenge, trying to find a mix of carrots and sticks that will pacify a disgruntled populace. Recently, however, there was more evidence the sticks have been out in force.
Last week the Chinese government began to censor billions of text messages sent between China's nearly 300 million cell phone users. Filters are being installed to monitor and delete messages that contain certain key words, phrases or numbers.
Last month, authorities detained Dr. Jiang Yanyong, a 72-year old surgeon in the People's Liberation Army who became a national hero for exposing the coverup of the SARS epidemic last year. He was arrested in response to a February letter to the party leadership urging them to admit their role in the bloody military assault on student, pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Hong Kong
In the former British colony of Hong Kong, where 350,000 marched in support of democracy on July 1, Beijing showed more flexibility. But it also signaled its readiness to veto a planned move to direct elections in 2007.
"I think they're nervous," says a U.S. official who closely follows Chinese developments. "The system is very brittle." The rise of protest, rural violence, strikes, even growing crime are all indications that the system of governance itself in China is under severe stress, he says.
The arrest of Jiang and the crackdown on text messages are linked. Jiang's expose of the extent of SARS got circulated via text messages. Hundreds of thousands of messages on the topic were sent on the same day.
Using technology to link up small groups and organize larger protests has not escaped the notice of the police, says RAND analyst Murray Scot Tanner, who has studied internal documents of the Ministry of Public Security.
"The government's biggest concern is not simply unrest," says Tanner. "The biggest concern is organized unrest and opposition."
In the SARS case, "the government's efforts to try to control information were not only ineffective, they backfired," says Tanner. And the current effort is likely to fail as well. Anyone trying to keep spam out of their e-mail box knows how sieve-like filters can be. And the Chinese language, with its extensive homonyms, lends itself particularly well to coded communication.
Much of the current discontent stems from the uneven nature of China's economic growth. In areas where growth has been slowest -- such as China's rust belt of outdated state-owned industry in the northeast -- the unrest has been the worst, according to the Chinese police data.
This lends support to those in the Chinese government who hope that growth itself will solve the problem. The carrot camp advocates buying off protest, making concessions and only cracking down hard when the opposition grows too large or too violent.
Government corruption
But Tanner sees evidence that growth alone will not make the unrest go away. "People are protesting because they are being badly treated politically, because the government is corrupt or because legal avenues to redress grievances are inefficient," he says. And even in areas where China is booming, such as in the southeast, there is rising protest.
How the Chinese government manages the pressure to open up its society is of no small concern to the United States. China is going to think twice about complying with agreements to open its economy to international competition if it means more strikes and labor unrest.
Beijing already resists American demands to impose economic sanctions on North Korea for fear it will trigger a flow of refugees into its troubled northeast region. And the Chinese are likely to get tougher on Taiwan if they fear the nationalist response of their own population.
X Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.