Heh, indeed.
NYRB: Do China's village protests help the regime?
The idea is to allow people whom the authorities consider unthreatening to write about the protests and come up with useful analyses that don’t pose a challenge to one-party rule. Thus we have seen a steady stream of level-headed reporting and analysis by people like Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who specializes in rural unrest. In postings over the past ten days on the most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, Yu has identified the problem as a conflict between officials’ desire for stability at all costs—hence the heavy-handed police presence in Wukan—and locals’ desire to protect their rights. He argues that the emphasis over the past two decades of economic growth has led to an elite (in this case, big real estate developers) that runs roughshod over poorer members in society.1 month agoIf this sounds like a radical, edgy analysis for China, it isn’t. Yu’s blog has 1.3 million followers. Open discussion of China’s wealth gap and local corruption are standard fare in Chinese academic journals and even in more mainstream media. Such news is harder to discuss in mass publications or on television, but the party has always kept the tightest reins on the media with the biggest audience. So the fact that Wukan isn’t on the front page of national newspapers but is being forthrightly discussed in narrower—though still widely accessible—forums is entirely predictable.
