Public Security and Governance in Contemporary China

Mingjun Zhang, Xinye Wu, Fang Fang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351721172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The recent rise in reported public security issues in China is one of the most repeated concerns amongst the Chinese authorities. During the past 30 years of reform in China, stability maintenance as a governance strategy has in fact laid a solid foundation for the overall development and growth of the nation. However, it remains to be seen whether this approach can sustain economic growth as well as political stability in the near future.

This book examines this policy of stability maintenance, as adopted by the Chinese government, in different social circumstances. Using a variety of examples, including hospital disputes, incidents of environmental pollution, food safety issues and disaster settlements, it takes a multi-disciplinary approach, using empirical data to assess the true picture of contentious politics in China. Although stability maintenance has played a major role in confronting many of the serious challenges posed to China's public security, ultimately, the book concludes that as a governance strategy it can only be short-term and will surely be replaced, due to its high costs.

Using case studies from across China, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Political Science and Sociology. It will also appeal to journalists and policy analysts with an interest in Chinese politics and society.

1 An analysis of typical contentious actions occurring in 2013

Mingjun Zhang and Peng Chen

Since 2013, with reform in China deepening further, both visible and invisible social risk indices have been rising steadily. Contentious actions (mass incidents) caused by various kinds of conflicts also present a rising trend and continue to occur in a relatively more intensive and aggressive way, drawing considerable attention. According to approximate statistics, there were about 165,000 contentious actions in China in 2013, about 460 on average per day. Analyzing some typical contentious actions in 2013 brought to light the following phenomena.

The overall situation of contentious actions in 2013

A review of contentious actions in 2013 found changes not only from the perspective of scale, the intensity degree of confrontation, types, breakout factors and consequences, but also regarding the main participants as well as the focal point of protests. From a general view, national contentious actions in 2013 are characterized by the following features.

Main causes of contentious actions

Statistically, contentious actions caused by land acquisition and housing demolition contributed the most in quantity and were of the highest intensity in 2013. This result is consistent with the data in the Blue Book of China Society issued by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Since land expropriation and housing removal is not confined to a single issue but involves a wide range of problems, contentious actions of this category often cover fields such as municipal road construction, resettlement compensation, employment and schooling, social security and community management. Each incident caused by land expropriation and housing removal is highly interconnected and intensive, involving a large number of people from all walks of life. As a consequence, contentious actions of this category are likely to trigger greater attention.

Objectively speaking, the frequent occurrence of conflicts caused by land acquisition and housing removal is directly connected to misconduct of the government. The 18th National Congress of the CPC put forward the Chinese-style path of carrying out industrialization in a new way by advancing application of information technology (IT), urbanization and agricultural modernization. Afterwards, during the “Two Sessions,” premier Li reiterated the strategy of the orderly releasing of the inner potential of urbanization. All these official documents transmit the message that urbanization will be the focus and direction of our new government. Some local governments have concentrated on launching strategies of urbanization as positive responses to central government policy; this in practice however has led to problems surfacing. Urbanization has been narrowly understood as constructing high buildings and large dwellings, roads and industrial and mining enterprises, but the most significant factor has been ignored – the satisfaction of people’s development and needs. This has led to some farmers being forced to give up their lands and move into denselypopulated buildings. For these farmers who are forced to give up their lands, monetary compensation that has been allocated in theory has been misused or appropriated in practice. Forced to give up their lands, large numbers of migrant farmers have moved into big cities to look for employment, but cannot enjoy public services such as education or medical services. These problems accumulate and eventually lead the government to clash with people. In other words, the misconduct of local government contributes importantly to contentious actions caused by land expropriation and the removal of housing.

Another reason for contentious actions caused by land acquisition and the removal of housing is the infringement of farmers’ interests resulting from village councils and other collective organizations withholding, misusing and appropriating monetary compensation for demolition. Incidents of this category have attracted wide attention because the financial compensation for demolition is not only what the farmers deserve but also the guarantee of their livelihoods after their lands have been expropriated or their houses have been demolished. In practice, however, the legality of the acts of local governments during the process of land expropriation cannot be effectively supervised so that financial compensation, as well as the supporting policies, cannot be assured for the farmers who deserve to benefit from it. This may be a result, on the one hand, of the absence of supervising systems and poor implementation of governmental decisions or, on the other, of the low educational level of farmers and their insufficient understanding of relevant policies. Once the farmers discover the deception and corruption of the village council, contentious actions break out on a large scale. A typical incident occurred on the October 10, 2013, when 150 people from Guanxi and Zhenning counties and 34 people from Zhenfeng county, Qian Xinan prefecture, Guizhou province, assembled in the owners’ camp of Dongqing Hydropower Station and insisted on an increase in the amount of financial compensation for the expropriation of their lands by the local government to extend Dongqing hydropower station.

The external reason for contentious actions of this category lies in the imperfect laws and regulations on land expropriation and the relevant light punishment for illicit land acquisition. The current Land Administration Law was enacted 30 years ago on June 25, 1986, and last amended more than ten years ago in 2004. Although it has been amended and improved many times, it still cannot meet the overall needs of current society. The Implementing Rules for Land Administration Law were revised in January 2011, but the actual effect is insufficient due to the limitations of the legislation and its implementation. These factors result in the ineffective regulation of land acquisition by current laws and regulations, and this sows the seed for outbreaks of contentious actions.

Main fields of contentious actions

Since land acquisition and housing demolition are the main causes of contentious actions, urban construction has been the “main battlefield” for such actions in 2013. Further analysis reveals that urban construction, labor disputes, environmental pollution, medical disputes and conflicts between officials and the population have become the main areas for contentious actions. The statistics in Figure 1.1 show that in 2013 urban construction accounted for 31.3 percent of contentious actions, labor disputes 13.2 percent, environmental pollution 14.3 percent, medical disputes 13.2 percent and disputes between officials and the population 14.4 percent.

Generally speaking, labor disputes are mainly caused by workers’ dissatisfaction with the great disparity in income and unfair performance-based distribution system. More precisely, there are three types of reasons for labor disputes: staff unemployment and resettlement due to enterprise reforms, severely overdue and underpaid salaries, and infringement of employees’ legitimate rights and interests under contract or labor law. The first type of above-mentioned contentious actions features four aspects: marginalized groups involved as one party, a strong demand for benefits as appeals, extremely violent confrontations as an irrational outlet, and unsound legal regulations as ineffective solutions. Overdue and underpaid labor remuneration such as salaries and project funds mainly lead to the outbreak of the second type of labor dispute, which have drawn more and more attention because of their increasingly violent nature, manifested by demonstrations on the street or in front of government offices, up to direct physical conflict with officials and police. Employees’ interests and rights cannot be guaranteed in some cases because of the malfeasance of local governments, who have attached more importance to accumulating more investment capital than in ensuring a reasonable amount of employees’ benefits during the period of rapid economic development. Under such circumstances, disputes caused by infringement of labor’s legitimate rights continue to arise. Some experts even claim that labor disputes have seriously threatened the public security of society and are therefore a main field where disturbances are likely to break out. It should be noted that there is a tendency for high-level intellectuals to be involved in labor disputes. For example, on March 16, 2013, all the teachers in the Chongqing Technology and Business University went on strike because they were dissatisfied with the performance appraisal reform scheme forcibly adopted by the university; the dissatisfaction resulted in a sudden outburst of anger on the part of the teachers’ who went on strike, blocking the entrance of the university and singing the national anthem.

Figure 1.1 Main fields of contentious actions occurring in 2013.

Contentious actions caused by environmental pollution have frequently occurred in recent years. In the afternoon of January 19, 2013, hundreds of citizens living near Kehua road, Nanshan district, Shenzhen held a demonstration protesting against the LCD factory located in the Science and Technology Park for discharging “three wastes” (water, gas and byproducts) that endangered local residents’ health. About 10,000 residents signed their names on a joint-boycott banner carrying the slogan “Poisonous Factory.” In the Songjiang District of Shanghai, hundreds of local residents demonstrated against a controversial battery plant project on May 12 of the same year. The Hefei Guoxuan High-tech Power Energy Company planned to build a battery plant in Songjiang district; local residents were worried that the plant would discharge polluted water and gas. It was reported that protestors assembled in the street, carrying placards with the slogan “No plants, we love Songjiang” and wearing T-shirts with the an image disapproving of building polluting plants. By and large, participants convey dissatisfaction in two contrasting ways: peace or violence. Participants carried out a comparatively peaceful and rational action by means of “group walking,” “group shopping” and a “group petition” in the landfill location incident in Guangzhou, which quickly subsided after a positive solution was agreed. Nevertheless, not all the contentious actions have taken place in the same peaceful way as this one. Irrationality and violence engulfed the “Shifang Disturbances” occurring in Sichuang province and the “Zhenghai Disturbance” in Zhejiang province. In reality, China has witnessed the frequent outbreak of contentious actions arising from environmental problems, and the frequency is likely to remain high in the near future, since, on the one hand, local governments are used to covering up information when undertaking projects and, on the other, they are heavily pressured under the performance-based assessment mechanism.

The outbreak of hospital–patient disputes rose to prominence in 2013. Director Li Bin of the National Family Planning Council said in a press conference that the overall outpatient quantity of medical and health institutions in 2013 reached 7.3 billion, and the number of hospital–patient disputes reached about 70,000. Although not all of these disputes can be seen as contentious actions, the severity of contentious actions in the medical and health field has been plainly exposed. The intensity, complexity, overreaction and collective reaction that are embedded in hospital–patient disputes have shaped the characteristics of medical disputes. When a dispute has taken place, patients as one party cling to a stereotype that their action will trigger far-reaching social consequences that will put the hospital as the other party under pressure as long as more participants are involved to make a bigger fuss. In practice, patients will ask their friends and relatives, as many as possible, by text message, Wechat and QQ (online messaging services) to participate. Dozens of people yell and shout in hospitals, put up slogans and hype up the event by uploading photographs of the scene to the internet. A typical case occurred in Guangzhou Elizabeth Maternity Hospital on December 9, 2013. The outbreak of medical disputes has gradually become a destabilizing factor in society that cannot be overlooked.

Disputes between officials and the population have been the typical type of mass incident in recent years. This is directly caused by the generally tense relationship between officials and the population, the root of which lies in the struggle for interests between the government and the populace. This derives from the inner desire of the government for expansion of its power manifesting mainly in two forms. The most typical one is the corruption of officials, who infringe the interests of ordinary people for their own private benefit. The other form is the prevailing bureaucratism demonstrated by misconduct and non-conduct of the government. Some officials are overconcerned about their own performance and reputation and push to launch “vanity projects” and “image projects” that waste manpower and money without ever taking ordinary people’s difficulties into account. Some officials shrug off their responsibilities to help those in need so that such problems remain unsettled for a long time and lead to increasingly severe antagonistic sentiments from the population against the government, finally erupting into confrontation. In developed areas, some local governments cannot appropriately handle the relation with the populace when dealing with problems such as land acquisition and housing removal, urban management, resources exploitation and security maintenance; a large number of cases thereby remain unsettled and the complaints of the victims involved gradually accumulate and harden into hatred, resulting in intense conflicts between the party and the populace, as well as direct confrontations between cadres and the populace. Disputes between officials and the population have most frequently turned into conflicts between the police and the common people, which mainly ensue from violation of the law, denial of justice and misconduct by the police when they are enforcing the law.

Hot spots of contentious actions

In terms of areas, developed coastal areas have become hot spots where contentious actions frequently took place in 2013, while towns and cities have have seen concentrated outbreaks of contentious actions. Many contentious actions occur in advanced areas, which means that there is a certain degree of correlation between economic levels and the breakout of contentious actions. To be more precise, the more intense contentious actions occur with higher frequency in more developed areas. This is because in these economically advanced areas, the public are aware that their economic and cultural interests are not being guaranteed under the present institutional system so that conflicts are triggered between an increasingly high demand from the public and the failure of the institutional system in meeting that demand.

Cities and towns saw a concentration of frequent contentious actions during 2013. This is closely related to the adjustment of national governance strategy. In the 1990s, rural contentious actions arising from the heavy burdens on farmers occurred in China one after another, which made rural areas a main battlefield for contentious actions. However, the burdens imposed on farmers have been relieved and farmers have benefited from all kinds of favorable policies, especially after the agricultural tax was abolished and the supplementary reforms were comprehensively implemented at the beginning of this century; this therefore led to rural contentious actions experiencing a rapid downward trend.

However, a number of new problems have shown up in urban areas. The pace of urbanization has accelerated so that the main battlefield where contentious actions intensively broke out has been transferred from rural areas to urban areas. This is mainly caused by three factors: unbalanced development during the process of urbanization as the latent cause, timely and convenient communication as the catalyst, and a large number of migrant people as the potential participants. During the rapid process of urbanization pace has been given priority instead of quality so that there have been the serious consequences of unbalanced development. In some places high buildings, large dwellings, and wide streets have been built and abundant product lines have been brought in while these public goods are not matched by the provision of educational and medical facilities. Undoubtedly, irresistible as the trend of urbanization is, many issues occur when supporting facilities do not accompany the intensively constructed physical environment, which lay the foundations for outbreaks of contentious actions. Second, rapid and convenient communication among urban ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface: stability maintenance in China – governance as a strategy rather than a  model
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An analysis of typical contentious actions occurring in 2013
• 2 How do contentious actions become violent? A preliminary analysis of 1,189 mass incidents in China
• 3 Violent hospital-patient disputes: emerging and escalating
• 4 Monetary compensation for mine disaster settlement
• 5 Domain security and nonconventional security: operation of the Chinese Kouan agency
• 6 Joint response mechanism of public emergencies in China
• 7 Policy changes for urban vendor management
• 8 Systematic response in China’s water pollution accidents
• 9 Food safety chain: policy and empirical perspectives
• 10 NPOs involved in social conflicts and the relationship with government
• 11 Social integration of second-generation rural migrants in Shanghai
• 12 Political priority over rule of law: ethnic conflicts and solutions in China
• Index