China: tremors but it ain't no earthquake

I thought it was just more reports -- there's nothing new in Chinese peasants, the unemployed and elements of the lumpen proletariat going on the rampage these past 15 years -- but there are increasing numbers of so-called 'mass incidents'. Just a month ago, Zhou Yongkang, China's public security minister, told Reuters there were 74,000 'mass incidents', or demonstrations and riots, in 2004 -- an increase from 58,000 the year before, and only 10,000 a decade ago.

There is a growing uneasiness in the air in China, after months of increasingly bold protests rolling across the countryside.
For reasons that range from rampant industrial pollution that recalls the shock of Minamata disease in Japan in the early 1960s to widespread evictions and land seizures by corrupt local governments working with increasingly powerful property developers, ordinary Chinese seem to be saying they are fed up and will not take it anymore.
Each week brings news of at least one or two incidents, with thousands of villagers in a pitched battle with the police, or bloody crackdowns in which hundreds of protesters are tear-gassed and clubbed during roundups by the police. And by the government's own official tally, hundreds of these events each week escape wider public attention altogether.

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