The People's Revolts of China

Two news stories provide further evidence that not all is calm in China.

First of all, is a Sky News story on a film that made it to the West in which rural protests are shown being violently put down.

The film shows dozens of hired thugs running amok in a village just 60 miles from the capital Beijing.

Villagers are shown being beaten with long canes while gunfire can be heard in the background.

Six villagers are reported to have died while 50 were injured.

The clashes, likened to a medieval battle, were over confiscation of land from peasants by the government.

Power station bosses are reported to have been negotiating with villagers to buy their land since 2003.

Local governments can chose to take the land and pay minimal compensation if the buyout is considered to be in the public interest.

And, according to this story, protests are astoundingly common.

About 58,000 protests took place across the country in 2003, according to a report in the Communist Party-backed magazine Outlook. The state-controlled media are barred from freely reporting on many protests, and details are often hard to come by. Video footage of a violent protest is rarer still.

While it isn't clear whether most or even many of these result in so much mayhem and loss of life as the one caught on film, 58,000 protests is particularly astounding in such a repressive state. Many of these center around land-grabbing from Chinese citizens by the government. These problems aren't confined to the country, either.

The tensions in Shengyou are playing out in many parts of China. On Thursday, villagers in a northern Beijing suburb blocked a road leading to their land, which they say has been taken unfairly from them to build an Olympic venue.

These developments, when considered in light of China's massive military buildup and its hunger for international status, bring to mind recent words by Mark Steyn.

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.

He goes on to ask, "How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide?" Are we closer to finding out than we think?

-- CAV