Yes Virginia, Chinese People DO Protest

Yesterday in my Weixin “moments” (similar to ‘the wall’ in Facebook) a number of bloody/riot pictures started showing up. Men clutching their bleeding heads, hundreds of people marching down the highway and other pictures which aroused my curiosity.

 
Then a foreign friend was going to the airport called me and asked if I could speak Chinese to her driver. The car had been stopped on the highway, and forced to turn around. I couldn’t totally understand the driver but he was telling me something about a village, and the government closing the street, and finally assured me that yes, my friend will arrive but it would take longer to get to the airport.
Realizing these were probably connected, and quite curious, I asked a student for details. She told me the local people in Yuhang (close to Hangzhou, the major city I live near) were protesting the proposal of Asia’s largest waste incinerator  plant in their hometown. The people were saying the plan was poor, it would ruin the environment and their health.

They didn’t want it and so they protested for a few weeks. Naturally, the government didn’t like it, so they sent in soldiers and more police and this weekend the whole thing turned into a riot which killed at least 2 people and a kid so far. Those were the pictures I was seeing on Weixin.
But, it seems like they were successful. According to this Reuters article, the government conceded and said it will only build if the local people agree to the plan.

You might think that sounds great. A modern day David and Goliath, but here’s the thing…it happens all the time.
I don’t want to get into the politics of each incidence, but it’s a major western misconception that chinese people “are passive and do nothing against their government.” I’ve heard time and time again from western friends (that aren’t familiar with china) that chinese people are “sheep” that accepts anything their government does.
Yes, the government is strict and free speech is squashed as a matter of policy, but it doesn’t mean people take it sitting down. I heard about this recent protest because it’s in my backyard, but the facts are there are more than 100,000 major protests in China every year. (Exact numbers are hard to find, but some say as much as 180,000 per year.)
And they are usually in response to government corruption or environmental problems. And they are often successful. Not even a month ago, in my best friends hometown, local people started rioting and beat 5 chengguan after they killed a civilian. (Chengguan are a extremely corrupt enforcement branch of the police department. They are usually endured, but recently their brutal ways have been getting more and more media attention and the local people have been protesting their rough methods.) And one city, Wukan, was so sick of their corrupt leaders they protested and won the right to vote for their leaders themselves without the communist party interfering.
And I don’t want to get into a argument if these fights are good or bad, or right or wrong, but I just want to make the point that they happen. And happen often. The population of China is getting more educated, richer and affluent and as a result they are paying attention to what’s happening in their neighborhoods, and fighting when they are not happy with the results.
The western media often gets stories about china laughably wrong. (Did you hear the recent one about lonely chinese students with cabbages as pets? Almost every major western media outlet reported it as such, and completely missed the point that it was performance art, and that the people were just joking. Or how about the one in which Beijing, due to high levels of smog, were showing the sunrise on giant TV’s set-up around the city? No they weren’t, it was just a well-timed photo of an ad that plays in Tiananmen square. The government had nothing to do with it, and the ad plays in all kinds of weather.)

I’m also not defending China and saying it’s a perfect place to live and people have free and open speech, because, of course, that’s stupid. While these local protests have been more and more successful there haven’t been any major (recent) consorted effort against the central government, and as the 25th anniversary of “nothing happening in China” approaches, the country is cracking and down and things like arrests of human rights activists are getting more and more frequent while the general public remains blissfully unaware.
(“Recently several lawyers have been arrested, but I don’t know why,” a student innocently told me the other night. The lawyers arrested are human rights lawyers, among others.)
I’m just trying to make the point that while China is not an open and free society, it is also not filled with “mindless sheep” that the western media portrays so often. People are fighting back against injustices and corruption. It’s seems like many westerners think it’s a myth, and it’s not true. Don’t always believe the stereotypes.