Beijing: It pays to be tough

A column of PLA soldiers in Liaoyang city sent to disperse a crowd gathered for protests last week

(CNN) -- The apparent success with which military units have broken up workers' protests in northeastern China has convinced Beijing that it pays to be tough.

That the use of brute force to crush labor unrest will remain a long-term state policy is apparent from a series of meetings held by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the para-military People's Armed Police (PAP) in the past fortnight.

The Liberation Army Daily reported last Friday that various PLA and PAP divisions had vowed to uphold their role of being "an important force in safeguarding social stability."

The officers also pledged to do their best to ensure the success of the 16th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress this autumn, which will witness a changing of the guard in the top echelons.

Why does the CCP leadership need the defense forces, whose main duty is supposedly to guard national boundaries, to maintain law and order -- and to "guarantee" the success of a party conference?

The answer can only be that Beijing fears losing control at a time when the so-called Third Generation of leaders -- who had experience handling disasters such as the Tiananmen Square massacre -- was about to yield power to the untested Fourth Generation.

An equally important reason is that labor unrest has assumed a number of ominous characteristics.

Firstly, the sit-ins and demonstrations are being held simultaneously in provinces including Sichuan, Ningxia, Hunan, Hubei, Liaoning and Heilongjiang.

And while there is no evidence of inter-provincial links, the relatively new phenomenon of workers from several factories staging joint action has become common.

Even more worrying to the authorities is that labor protests are better organized, in many cases by underground trade unions.

And the long-drawn-out struggles in Liaoyang, Liaoning Province and the Daqing oilfield, Heilongjiang Province, have shown that ordinary laborers -- including work hands with barely high school education and little knowledge of the globally acknowledged civil rights -- are willing to stick their neck out for their leaders despite official intimidation.

Solidarity

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As early as 1986, late patriarch Deng Xiaoping had warned against the danger of the birth of a Chinese-style Solidarity movement.

Yet wild-cat unions have burgeoned the past year despite the heavy-handed suppression and surveillance by the police, state security agents and the PAP.

Another danger signal for Beijing is that up until a year ago, most demonstrators were out to demand back pay and other economic benefits.

However, in more and more protests, as in the Liaoyang case, workers are pursuing political goals such as the removal of corrupt or callous officials.

And Beijing is nervous about the possibility that angry laborers may join hands with other social sectors under the banner of fighting graft and other kinds of abuse of power by party cadres.

For example, most peasant riots are a reaction against endemic corruption as much as the decline of rural income.

After all, a main cause of hardship in the countryside is that farmers are often slapped with 60 different kinds of taxes, levies and illegal charges.

Unemployed Chinese workers are becoming commonplace as the state closes inefficient businesses

Heightened activism in factories has also coincided with growing numbers of non-labor related protests that are targeted at cadres who have cheated at grassroots-level elections or who have offered shelter to triads and other criminals.

In the past two months alone, such protests have been reported in Beijing, Guangdong and Zhejiang.

More moderate members of the leadership such as the Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihuan, have argued that the authorities should handle these instances of "social contradiction" with a spirit of reconciliation.

Li, who may become chairman of the National People's Congress next year, has urged Beijing to provide more opportunities for disadvantaged sectors such as laid-off workers to vent their frustration and spleen.

So far, however, the only signs of a softer approach have manifested themselves in media commentaries on the imperative of promoting clean government and improving the image of officials.

For example, the People's Daily last Thursday ran a commentary decrying "the phenomenon of party members behaving in a manner that is unbecoming of their status."

Real reforms?

State papers have also carried an article written by a group of liberal professors in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the fact that cadres "must have the right concept of power."

Citing numerous cases of officials embezzling government funds or feasting and patronizing prostitutes at public expense, the article said "the party must put its house in order and maintain stern discipline."

PLA soldiers and local police face a crowd of protesters in front of the Liaoyang city government office last week

Unfortunately, these demonstrations of mea culpa do not mean that the CCP is about to contemplate real reforms such as allowing workers and peasants a greater say in politics -- or in their own affairs.

Despite Beijing having signed the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights five years ago, the leadership has ruled out allowing workers to form trade unions.

After China's entry to the World Trade Organization late last year, many foreign firms and professionals have been accorded so-called "national treatment" in the country.

Yet, most farmers still remain second-class citizens who lack basic rights such as moving from region to region -- or growing and disposing of their produce without state interference.

Instead of attempting genuine reforms, however, the leadership has apparently decided to rely on the "tools of the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Under President Jiang Zemin, the ranks of the PAP -- the state's main weapon for quelling protests -- have swollen from around half a million in the late 1980s to more than 1 million.

Yet there seems little doubt that this secretive armed force, whose size and budget are never publicized, would exacerbate instead of resolve the country's mounting contradictions.