Peasant Revolts in China

Here is an interesting, and very long account of, shall we say, the proletariat revolting against the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in China.

To alert people in this gritty farm town that police were pouring in, watchful residents set off fireworks by the hundreds.

By the time dawn broke, up to 20,000 peasants from the half-dozen villages that make up Huaxi township had responded to the alarm, participants recounted, and they were in no mood to bow to authority. For four years, they had been complaining that industrial pollution was poisoning the land, stunting the crops and fouling the water in their fertile valley surrounded by forested hills 120 miles south of Hangzhou. And now their protest -- blocking the entrance to an industrial park -- was being put down by force.

A pitched battle erupted that soggy morning between enraged farmers and badly outnumbered police. By the end of the day, high-ranking officials had fled in their black sedans and hundreds of policemen had scattered in panic while farmers destroyed their vehicles. It was a rare triumph for the peasants, rising up against the all-powerful Communist Party government.

While the story may seem to have a silly and gratuitous environmentalist slant, methinks the complaints that sparked this particular rebellion were about real pollution, consistent with the kind revealed in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism there, rather than the hyped-up nonsense people in the United States complain about.

While the particular account is interesting -- notice the prominent role played by fireworks, which we use to celebrate our own freedom -- the more important story is this:

The confrontation was also a glimpse of a gathering force that could help shape the future of China: the power of spontaneous mass protest. Peasants and workers left behind by China's economic boom increasingly have resorted to the kind of unrest that ignited in Huaxi. Their explosions of anger have become a potential source of instability and a threat to the party's monopoly on power that has leaders in Beijing worried. By some accounts, there have been thousands of such protests a year, often met with force.

Perhaps the Commies aren't quite as in control as they seem.

-- CAV