Protesting workers, rioting peasants and Sunday's bomb explosion in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, add up to a scary picture of just how bad things are in parts of China. In Mao Zedong's home province, the economic problems are piling up so thick and fast that unrest can easily turn into revolt.
Last year angry workers staged 60 protests outside the provincial party headquarters, so many that the authorities issued an emergency decree on December 29 outlawing further protests. Yet the protests are continuing in this rural province of 60 million. In Changde city, a third of its 10,000 cotton mill factory workers have been laid off without pay, and on Monday 500 blocked a new highway to press demands for three months' subsistence wages.
In November, 200 workers from the Laiteer Company blocked traffic in Changsha holding up banners which said: 'Not a yuan in six months, we want rice to eat'.
Hunan's industrial economy is close to breakdown and the government is bankrupt. From an industrial workforce of four million in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), a million have already been fired. The province has 140 SOEs in operation which are losing money, especially in the textile sector. Beijing is trying to cut over-capacity and return the sector to profitability. Last year it fired 660,000 textile workers. This year the target is 1.1 million workers. Hunan laid off 21,000 workers last year but the big push was supposed to come this year.
'We just can't do it now, it will undermine social stability,' a spokesman at the Industrial Management Centre of the Hunan Textile Bureau admitted. 'The government is in financial difficulties so it cannot even support the workers already laid off.' Many Hunanese textile factories are in small rural towns where the crisis is even worse. 'They are in such trouble that they can't even pay their staff salaries. They have no money to pay laid off workers,' the spokesman said.
About 88 per cent of Hunan's county governments are bankrupt with a combined debt of six billion yuan (about HK$5.61 billion). Local officials have squandered the money on failed projects or embezzled it to fund family businesses. The scale of the corruption in rural China is only just being admitted.
