China’s ’spin’ on social unrest

The political aftershocks of the Sichuan earthquake are now emerging, writes Bruce Gilley, author of “China’s Democratic Future“. The quake left 88,000 people dead or missing and the communist authorities’ response was an issue of acute political sensitivity. Gilley quotes officials’ observation that “natural disasters often threaten ruling parties with collapse or replacement if they are not handled properly.”

The quake not only “undermined support for local government in the affected areas, and intensified the campaign against corruption,” he notes. It also prompted a shift in elite public opinion on the function of civil society “which conservatives accurately view as a dangerous double-edged sword that will slice authority away from the party-state.”

But expectations of a liberalization of a system in which NGOs are closely regulated by the state may be premature given official anxiety about current levels of social unrest, including the recent taxi strikes, Longnan riots and protests by laid-off workers at closed factories in southern China.

The first sustained wave of protests in decades could be emerging. “Keeping such local strains from escalating into broader political tensions is a high priority for the government,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citing the country’s top public-security official’s call to identify and control risks to social stability.

Such events have also prompted the communist authorities to change their approach to managing the media. Realizing the difficulty of blocking or censoring information in the age of the internet and cell phones, the party is trying to ‘spin’ the news by getting in first with its interpretation of events.  

“The Chinese government has started to loosen its control on the negative information,” said an academic familiar with the propaganda agencies. “They are trying to control the news by publicizing the news.”