[MUSIC] This section will talk about Collective Action and Protest. While group activity seems to be more organized with some people working within business associations. What we can also see in China is what we would call collective action. Where people much more spontaneously will behave in a certain way. Will act in a way to try and influence policy. And one of the biggest examples that we have seen of that, and I have personally witnessed it because I was there. Was in April 4th, 1976, right near the end of the Mao era. Mao was already in reasonably poor health. And what we found, what happened was that Deng Xiaoping was politically in trouble. And the Gang of Four were trying to stop any effort that he was doing to try and push for reform. The people didn't like that. The people actually decided that they wanted more reform, like Deng Xiaoping had been trying to do in 1975. And so in 1976, they take to the square. They go out into Tiananmen Square. I'm up here on the obelisk in Tiananmen Square, and I'm shooting a picture going back here to Tiananmen. And, there are about a half a million people in the square on this day. This is 1976, April 1976, and here's one more picture from the other side. I was standing up here on the obelisk, shooting that way, now I'm on the other side with the great, with the gate of heavenly piece Tiananmen behind me shooting out towards the obelisk. And you can see just a an ocean a sea of wreaths that have been sent and those wreaths were sent to challenge at to attack the Gang of Four, and try and advocate for their actually their being purged. Which happens soon after Mao dies. In the 1980s we saw lots of protests. Students just getting involved in collective action. A lot of it was anti Japanese protests, that was the main target that they were involved with. And then we get the biggest political action of the post 1949 era. The biggest sort of group or collective action that we saw, which were the students challenging the communist party in Tiananmen Square, June 4th. 1989 and I was actually in the square as that happened. And since then we've seen other kinds of political action, laid off workers in the 1990s, 94, 95, 96, 97, we saw workers who were being laid off get involved in strikes and political action. And today the most common action, the most common protest that we see are actually protests over land. Because local officials are expropriating land away from the peasants. And these protest often can become quite violent. And part of the problem from my own perspective. And I mentioned this before. Is that China faces a real dilemma. The Communist party faces a real dilemma. Which is on the one hand, they're afraid of protest. And they're afraid to create these new kinds of organizations or what we would call institutions, elections, assemblies that can be voted in, opportunities even though petitions are acceptable. They still try and constrain them. So my argument is, that in fact, the main forum of political participation in China has actually become protests. I often say, jokingly, if you want to participate in Chinese politics, one of the main things you can do would be to attack a government office. Or attack a police station. Or flip over some police cars and stuff like that. We see these kinds of protests happening a lot. In China, hundreds, tens of thousands of protest like that. Every year and part of it is that there are very weak institutions in China. The courts were not a system that could be used and people had to go and engage in this kind of protest behavior, hopefully to try and get some attention from the journalists, from the news media. Who would then maybe write a story or publish a story about their grievances. Now, I have a friend who works in the Chinese government and I remember reading a article, interview with him, where in fact he said that protests were a good thing. Particularly, rural protests because that let the top leadership know where the problems were because there was no real way for information to come flowing up from society to the top leaders to tell them where the problems were. Another friend of mine who lived in the countryside outside Nanjing, he once told me that if he wanted he had a complaint he and a group of people felt they were being abused. Their land was being confiscated and they wanted to go to court. They tried to stay within the legal bounds, but as he said they had to make trouble. Well we would say in Chinese, now, sure, now you have to make trouble and if you do not make trouble then you are not going to get any attention from the state and so again. That means that you have to engage in some kind of protest if you want to succeed in getting your interests listened to and responded to by the party and so here is the corruption, inequality, and environmental degradation. These are a big problem within China. We've seen lots of reports within social science magazines and journals and a lot of people are doing research. Our student's in UST, doing reasearch about associations of apartment owners who feel abused because all of a sudden, the developers have disappeared and the parking lot's not done. Or they promised some swimming pool or some kind of public facilities in the apartment building, and those apartments, those facilities, never appear. And so you can see that in fact the number of protests, and these are the number of protests reported by the security bureau in China has risen dramatically. All right, so this isn't just me making this stuff up, right? There's a real problem here in terms of the number of protests and the extent to which citizens feel that they must protest to get their interests heard. So in 2003 there was reported 55 thousand protests. Well, basically, almost four times, three and a half times that, seven years later. As in 2010, China was already reporting a 180 or 185 thousand protests. And if you figure that people sleep eight hours a day so you can protest only 16 hours a day, all right. Now if you take this 180,000 and divide it up, you could calculate that one protest breaks out in China every three minutes. And that there are approximately 250 protests, right now, underway across China. Now, China's a big country and 1.3 billion people and maybe we'd want to see how many protests are going on in India. We don't really know, we don't have the data but it seems that the public security bureau very much wants the people of China to know that there is this unrest. Therefore, they should support the state's crackdown on individual freedom. That they should support the states crack down and efforts to organize and control people. Otherwise the country side will swamp the cities.
