September 18, 2012
Japanese factories in China were shut down yesterday as the anti-Japanese riots escalated. More here and here.
Nicked from Ampotan
More on the Senkaku dispute here and here. Scary stuff.
...but wait...there's more...
There's a lot more here and here over at Ampotan which is covering the situation via the local media.
Their coverage includes this interesting tidbit...
This photo appeared on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. Photographs such as these don’t last long on the Net in China. It reads: Chinese people! What should we oppose? No wage increases. Public officials make large profits from illegal land transactions. We can’t buy a home. We die because we can’t go to a hospital. We can’t die because graves are too expensive. We use all our assets to graduate from college and still can’t get a job.
There are 30 grievances in all. I don’t see any about the Japanese.
There's a bit more going on than just a territorial dispute, but the mobs anger is a monster not readily put to sleep once awakened.
...and this is possibly the most chilling quote...
"The Mao Zedong era was better, because most people were equal. The methods of the current government are ugly.â€
Wow.
If that's a common attitude, then he and others may indeed discover the true meaning of ugly.
Lets pray they don't.
Interesting times indeed.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
02:12 PM
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It's traditional in totalitarian states when the peasants start grumbling to try to rally them by picking an external fight. E.g. Argentina's periodic attempts to take the Falkland Islands.
With the world economic slowdown, which is finally affecting China's internal economy, I wonder if that's what's going on this time. The Senkaku islands would make a perfect distraction.
A revolution in China right about now would be pretty terrifying. But there's never been a totalitarian government which built a large bourgeois class and didn't eventually face revolution from them. (Contra Marxist ideology, revolution is a sport of the bourgeois. The proletariat never revolts.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Sep 18 14:31:02 2012 (+rSRq)
"Legitimacy", in this context, is the perception among the public that the government has the right to rule. This runs very high in, say, democratic countries right after election time, when the government can point directly to the election results as evidence of the mandate of the electorate. It runs very low in totalitarian nations that have just suffered a coup, since that drives home the notion that the man on top is only on top by the power of shooting anyone who disagrees. (By contrast, a totalitarian government can have high legitimacy if the people believe that government policies are an expression of their own desires... for example, Nazi Germany around 1937.)
China's original legitimacy stemmed from promulgation of the Communist revolution. That's dead, dead, dead these days... but nothing much has come to replace it either. China's still ruled by a nominally-Communist party that, in practice, is turning into a hereditary oligarchy of party officials. The adoption of capitalism has helped soften that a lot by providing good economic growth, and nothing puts off revolution like today being measurably better than yesterday. This is especially true when the freedoms that are thereby restricted were never really enjoyed by the Chinese to begin with...
But without that economic growth, people have a greater incentive to take a close look at the governance of China, and that is an ugly thing to look at these days.
Can China whip up enough anti-Japanese sentiment? They can't actually go to war with Japan, because that brings in the US. More to the point, China needs Western markets more than Western markets need China. If things get sufficiently bad there, retaliatory tariffs have the potential to gut the Chinese growth engine and kick off precisely the kind of unrest that the Chinese government is trying to prevent with their jingoist nonsense...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Sep 18 15:11:58 2012 (GJQTS)
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