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China warns economic woes could trigger major unrest
2009-01-07
BEIJING (AFP) - China's state media has issued an unusually candid warning of the risk of mass riots this year, in what observers said Wednesday reflected increasing jitters about the global economic crisis. Outlook magazine, an authoritative weekly published by the Xinhua news agency, said in this week's edition that the economy might become so bad in the coming months that China's social fabric could start unravelling. "Due to deepening economic difficulties and social security problems since the second half of 2008, enterprise closedowns, layoffs and labour disputes have significantly increased, triggering a rise in mass incidents," it said. "Economic pressures affect the sentiment of various social strata, and disadvantaged groups in particular are seeing their livelihood threatened. Their pent-up discontent could easily burst out... and spark mass conflicts." According to one ominous statistic cited in the magazine, close to 10 million migrant workers out of a total of 120 to 130 million have lost their jobs as crises overseas have hit the nation's export-dependent economy. The warning, reiterated in Wednesday's China Youth Daily, the Communist Youth League's publication, came as the nation was coming to terms with the worst macroeconomic data in recent memory. The Chinese economy grew by nine percent in the third quarter, the lowest rate in over five years, and the World Bank has forecast growth this year of 7.5 percent, a level not seen since 1990. Political scientist Paul Harris said the worsening economy was potentially explosive for China's communist chiefs, who for years have been able to use rising prosperity to help offset deep social tensions about many injustices. "The government has a long history of being able to deal with protest," said Harris, from Hong Kong's Lingnan University. "But the big question is if it (protest) will become genuinely widespread, and that can only come from economic issues." Dissatisfaction with the economy could be further aggravated by the 60th anniversary of the founding of the communist People's Republic in October, he said. "The anniversary of the founding of the republic will be significant. People will reflexively, automatically look back and ask where everyone has come since the founding," he said. The 20th anniversary in June of the Tiananmen massacre, when troops quelled months of democracy protests in the Chinese capital, will be another sensitive time. The fact that the government picked Outlook weekly, which is mainly read by officials and intellectuals, suggests the warning is targeted at an elite audience charged with handling the unrest, observers said. But more generally, it also reflects new thinking among Communist Party leaders who, in the age of the Internet, have given up trying to completely suppress unpleasant news and aim instead to put their own spin on it. "There is a recognition that the party cannot control news the way they could in the past," said David Bandurski, a researcher at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. "So there has been a tendency over the last year to emphasise the party getting its own message out." Outlook magazine warned that February could be a particularly sensitive time, when migrant workers return to the big cities from this month's Lunar New Year holiday. But the possibility that those workers may stay in their rural homes rather than go back to near-certain unemployment could help defuse the potential for unrest, said Harris. "That spreads the grievances out much more thinly. You don't want people in the cities to band together in raving mobs. So paradoxically, the economic crisis helps make the issues more manageable," he said.
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