Could mass layoffs in China result in a violent crackdown on unrest by the CCP?

Mr T said:

But it happened - the central government is responsible for failing to provide citizens with the rights that would protect them against it. It has also failed/refused to impliment rule of law such that would stop the authorities from being able to do it.

Please show me the last time something like this happened in the UK.



What, by refusing to declare martial law and not sendiing in the army to shoot civilians? I would say the crackdown did more to jepordise China's stability than anything else - the old men were essentially playing russian roulette.



Then why was a group of protesters arrested outside the foreign ministry recently?



Can you prove they are doing that? There is a difference between making a figure up and reporting something that comes from an official source.

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Mr T said:

But it happened - the central government is responsible for failing to provide citizens with the rights that would protect them against it. It has also failed/refused to impliment rule of law such that would stop the authorities from being able to do it.

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Mr T said:

What, by refusing to declare martial law and not sendiing in the army to shoot civilians?

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Mr T said:

I would say the crackdown did more to jepordise China's stability than anything else - the old men were essentially playing russian roulette.

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Mr T said:

Then why was a group of protesters arrested outside the foreign ministry recently?

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Mr T said:

Can you prove they are doing that? There is a difference between making a figure up and reporting something that comes from an official source.

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Engineer said:

By the same logic, every single government in the world should be responsible for every single murder that happened in their country because they failed to protect the victims against being killed.

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They are not allowed to do that

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Yes, by not declaring martial law and not putting an end to a criminal activity.

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I would say the increase of economical, technological, and most importantly standard of living prove otherwise.

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all of them arrested protestors sometime in the past, especially for those countries that have hosted the WTO conference.

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So now you are arguing that it is alright for the media to take something out of context to misrepresent their own fictions as facts

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SampanViking said:

OK Mr T calm down. Just remember its also an offence to protest within a Mile of the Houses of Parliament without first obtaining permission, so nobody is exactly whiter than white.

Maybe a short cooling off period is jsut what the thread requires.

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Who would have thought a few months ago that China might end up remembering 2008 not for the Beijing Olympics or May's Sichuan earthquake but for the demise of the country's model of economic development? Might is the operative word. China's attachment to investment, exports and heavy industry runs deep.

After all, these have been the drivers of the remarkable growth of 10 percent a year that China has enjoyed since it embarked on market reforms 30 years ago this month, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process. Weaning the economy off exports in favor of domestic consumption driven by services is easier said than done.

But the closure of thousands of factories as export demand evaporates has dealt a serious blow to China's confidence. President Hu Jintao has gone so far as to say that turning the challenges posed by the global credit crisis into opportunities would be a test of the Communist Party's capacity to govern. China, in short, realizes it needs to stand on its own feet.

So expectations are running high that a meeting starting on Monday of China's top leaders to chart economic policy for 2009 will finally get serious about boosting home-grown spending. The scale of the task is daunting. Household consumption last year made up just 35.3 percent of China's gross domestic product, a record low for a major country in peacetime. In the 1980s, it was over 50 percent. By comparison, the U.S. ratio last year was 72 percent. If America spends too much for the sake of global economic balance, China has taken thrift to new extremes. That needs to change.

Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist with Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong, cites the pending nationwide expansion of a scheme offering a 13 percent tax break to rural buyers of televisions and washing machines as evidence that China is already looking to tap its own potential. The initial pilot program in a handful of provinces led to a 40 percent increase in sales of household appliances.

"The fact manufacturers are turning to Chinese villagers rather than American consumers is a symbolic milestone in the global rebalancing story," Simpfendorfer said. "This is a slow burn story. It won't save the global economy from its current problems. But it may help to shape the global economy over the next decade," he added.

Raising the income tax threshold; pay rises for state workers; increases in housing subsidies and minimum income support; and extra outlays on health, pensions and education are among other ideas this week's strategy sessions will examine to get people to spend more freely.

But, skeptics ask, if Beijing is so serious about increasing disposable incomes, why is the state budget for health care and education so puny? These are the two largest out-of-pocket expenses for most Chinese. Public spending on health care and education comes to just 1.8 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP respectively, well below the global average. And only 1 percent of China's new 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan is earmarked for the two sectors.

One of the rationalizations is that China has not had the bureaucracy in place to ensure extra money is used wisely. It's easy to pour concrete to build a clinic. It's tougher to train doctors and nurses and administer a medical insurance scheme across a sprawling, developing country -- to say nothing of making sure the money is not siphoned off.

But Calla Wiemer, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Los Angeles Center for Chinese Studies, says China has made notable progress in recent years by shifting responsibility for the delivery of social services from towns and villages to the county level, where personnel are better trained. By last year, 86 percent of rural counties had established cooperative medical schemes, she said in a recent opinion piece.

"While these have not been ambitious in terms of the dollar amounts -- the level of coverage is typically under $10 per person per year -- they've contributed importantly to administrative capacity building," Wiemer wrote.

David Dollar, head of the World Bank office in Beijing, makes a similar point. "The institutional structures are in place so that the government could increase spending quite significantly and quite effectively," he said. "It would be both good fiscal stimulus and it would help with the whole social development agenda." That sounds like common sense, but some scholars wonder whether China has the political set-up needed to accommodate a switch from infrastructure to social spending.

Zhiwu Chen, a finance professor at Yale School of Management, argues that returning money to the people -- through lower taxes or spending on social programs -- is not a priority in China because its leaders do not have to stand for election. This explains not only why democracies such as Brazil and India lag behind China in infrastructure but why China's economic stimulus package is concentrated on road and rail building.

"In a non-democracy, officials are held accountable to their superiors, not voters. And for one's superiors, tangible projects are the easiest to recognize," Chen said in a syndicated column.

For 30 years, concentrating resources in the hands of the government through state ownership and taxes has served China well. But the private consumption needed to power self-sustained growth is lacking. For that, Chen argues, China must boost incomes and increase people's sense of financial security.

"Building a nation demands more than steel and concrete," he wrote.

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Mr T said:

Also officials are supposed to abide by the rule of law and look after citizens.

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Mr T said:

The central government is responsible for passing laws that improve citizens rights against abuse by the State. No one else can do that.

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Mr T said:

So how are they able to do it? Why would a policeman detain someone because the local government didn't want them to go to Beijing? Why would a doctor in one of these institutions agree to keep someone there when there was nothing wrong with them? Why were these people able to be committed without any sort of process being observed?

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Mr T said:

So is peaceful protest legal or not in China? Things were peaceful until the troops moved in. Besides, this "criminal" activity wasn't harming the country - it was just putting pressure on the government to do something about corruption.

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Mr T said:

Hence my use of the phrase "Russian roulette". They could not predict that the economy would improve - they were taking a deadly risk that could have backfired and resulted in a national blood-bath.

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Mr T said:

Ok, let's be fair. Sometimes city authorities will allow protests that aren't against them directly (more like polluting companies, etc). But how many times in the last year were there protests in Beijing/other major cities against the central Chinese government that were not broken up and the attendants arrested?

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