Protests now flourish in China

On the 15th anniversary of China's suppression of student protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, few in the West seem aware that Beijing is again confronting a growing volume of popular protest. Even more surprising, reports of this widespread protest are being confirmed by China's own police forces, which used to routinely deny permission for most protest demonstrations.

Recent official police statistics are striking. The number of demonstrations increased from 8,700 to 32,000 from 1993 to 1999 - an increase of 268 percent. The number probably swelled past 40,000 in 2000. In no year during this period did protests increase by less than 9 percent, and in the financial crisis years of 1997 and 1998 they spiked by 25 and 67 percent, respectively.

Though we lack nationwide data for the years since 2000, Chinese government reports indicate that the number of public protests has probably risen each of the last three years. Sichuan, China's largest province, apparently saw an increase in protests of almost 20 percent last year, to nearly 1,500.

No region has experienced more demonstrations than the aging northeastern rustbelt, known to the West as Manchuria, where market reforms have badly hurt workers and pensioners from inefficient state enterprises. Police in Liaoning Province on the border with North Korea claimed a stunning 9,559 incidents involving more than 863,000 people between January 2000 and September 2002 - an average of almost 10 incidents involving 90 people each day for nearly three years.

Yet, save for occasional high-profile outbursts such as the worker protests in the northeast in the summer of 2002 or pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, we hear little about unrest. Undoubtedly, a key reason is that today's protesters lack the telegenic grip of those brave young hunger strikers

of 1989.

For China's stability, a greater concern than these raw numbers is the changing style of protest. Police concede that demonstrators are gradually outgrowing the deliberately small-scale, self-contained tactics they adopted in the 1990s to avoid repression. Protests are expanding in average size, becoming more organized and confrontational, and increasingly link demonstrators from several workplaces or neighborhoods. Clever tacticians, protesters now routinely place retirees, women and children in the front ranks to shame factory managers and paralyze police.

Yeah, well, good luck with that.