On June 19, in Athens, 8,000 people protested the government's plan to raise taxes, cut public sector jobs and sell off state assets. The city's Syntagma Square has become a permanent tent city, with a steady diet of protest speeches, street theater and music. Employees at the country's electric power plants will begin rolling 48-hour strikes next week. Unions are planning a 48-hour general strike to coincide with a vote in Parliament on a new austerity package.
Meanwhile in China, the anniversary of the June 4 attack by Chinese army units against demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square has passed without coordinated large-scale protests. Somewhere between several hundred and several thousand protesters were killed in 1989 when the army moved in, firing live ammunition at the crowd. The events in the capital kicked off a massive crackdown on protests outside the capital city and a purge of any party official who had even hinted at support for the protesters' demands.
The lack of a coordinated, large-scale protest, however, doesn't mean that China has been peaceful. The country is seeing an increase in uncoordinated protests over seemingly local problems. Last week a protest against lead poisoning in Zhejiang province resulted in one of the largest group petitions for redress this year. Three days of riots in Zengcheng broke out after a pregnant migrant worker was roughed up by government security guards trying to stop her from selling goods outside a supermarket. Elsewhere in Guangdong, a stabbing of a worker at a ceramics factory, allegedly ordered by his boss after the worker asked for unpaid wages, prompted clashes between workers and police. On June 12, a man set off a bomb outside a local government headquarters in Tianjin. That followed hard on the heels of three explosions in Fuzhou "protesting" the illegal removal of a building in 2002.
Jim Jubak
The most recent figures on what China calls "mass incidents," a category that includes petitions, demonstrations and strikes, date from 2010. It shows mass incidents hitting 180,000 in 2010, up from 87,000 in 2005, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
These incidents are only seemingly local, however. There may not be anything coordinated about this, and the scale may be small for China -- 600 workers here, 800 protesters there -- but Beijing has a national problem nonetheless. The same festering social problem underlies most of these protests, and it's not going away.
A serious challenge to leadership
I'm talking about the anger of the 150 million to 240 million migrant workers who have helped fuel China's extraordinary growth with their cheap labor but who have not shared in the country's new wealth. I think it's safe to say that China's leaders are facing the most serious challenge yet to the mix of economic and political policies that has fueled the country's dynamic growth over the past three decades.
The root of the problem is China's hukou system of household registration. Migrant workers aren't considered residents of the cities where they live, which means they aren't entitled to health care, pensions, housing subsidies or education for their children. To educate their children, migrant workers either have to find the money to pay for schooling in the cities where they work or send their children back to the rural areas where they officially still live. With migrant workers earning so little -- the average is about $250 a month -- sending children back home is often the only option.
The hukou system is nothing new, so why the increase in protests now? Three reasons, I think. First, the contrast between the country's newly wealthy and this vast migrant underclass has fed anger at the unfairness of the system. Second, because China's growth has produced labor shortages in many parts of eastern, export-oriented China and because Beijing has pushed growth into lagging western provinces, migrant workers have more bargaining power. They can find work closer to home if they don't like the way they're treated in the traditional fast-growth provinces. Third, China's increasing inflation rate has come down particularly hard on the country's poorest residents. The annual overall inflation rate was 5.5% in May, but food inflation is running at well over 10% annually. If you make just $250 a month -- and remember that's the average, so some migrant workers make even less -- and spend 35% of your family budget on food, then 10% food inflation is pinning you to the wall.
Beijing knows it has a problem. A government report from the Development Research Center of the State Council, republished last week, warns that if migrant workers "are not absorbed into urban society and do not enjoy the rights they're entitled to, many conflicts will accumulate." The report projects that 9 million additional migrant workers will join the urban workforce each year between now and 2015.
