Something odd is happening in China. The country is arguably experiencing the most intense and violent social unrest in recent years despite the unusually repressive measures imposed by Beijing since the 'jasmine revolution' to maintain political stability.
In an incident eerily reminiscent of the spark that set off the 'jasmine revolution' in Tunisia, last week in Zengcheng , a township in Guangdong, news that members of China's much-reviled urban management bureau mistreated a 20-year-old pregnant migrant street vendor ignited an ugly riot. Thousands of enraged protesters set fire to government buildings and fought riot police with bricks and bottles. The authorities had to dispatch hundreds of riot police to restore order.
This incident happened on the heels of several highly publicised and equally disturbing protests. On June 9, in the city of Lichuan in Hubei province, the death in police custody of a local legislator known for his anti-corruption crusade sent thousands of protesters into the street, attacking local government buildings and clashing with anti-riot police. At the end of May, thousands of Mongolian college students demonstrated after a Mongolian herder was killed by a Han Chinese coal truck driver. Around the same time, a 52-year-old man in Jiangxi , driven to despair after local authorities decided to demolish his house, became a Chinese version of the suicide bomber when he exploded three homemade bombs outside local government buildings - killing himself and two other people.
Of course, riots and protests occur in China routinely. Although the government has stopped releasing official numbers on such disturbances, leaked official data cited by the Western press shows that 127,000 mass incidents took place in 2008. What makes the most recent mass incidents noteworthy is both their varied causes and the apparent ineffectiveness of Beijing's sustained and costly campaign of maintaining social peace.
In the case of the Zengcheng incident, the cause of the riot was abusive treatment of ordinary citizens (in this case, discriminated migrant labourers) by low-level government employees. In Lichuan, it was corruption and police brutality. In Inner Mongolia, it was ethnic strife and environmental degradation. In Fuzhou, Jiangxi, it was forced eviction and demolition, a common scourge that has enriched local governments and developers but victimised millions of ordinary people.
What this list suggests is that the causes of social unrest in China are systemic - ordinary citizens are driven to desperate and violent protests because of the lack of the rule of law and the pervasive abuse of power by officials, often in pursuit of the policy objectives mandated by the Chinese government.
The connection between social unrest and the lack of rule of law on the mainland is self-evident. Had Chinese courts been empowered to curb the abuse of power by local governments, it is highly likely that aggrieved citizens would opt for judicial remedies, not high-risk violent confrontations with the authorities. In this regard, a comparison with India is instructive. Both China and India are experiencing wrenching social dislocations as a result of rapid modernisation. But the kind of state-society conflict, manifested in hundreds of clashes between ordinary citizens and local authorities in China daily, is exceedingly rare in India, which has a far more robust legal system.