{"id":2647,"date":"2011-12-22T12:33:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T17:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/citings\/?p=2647"},"modified":"2011-12-22T10:34:03","modified_gmt":"2011-12-22T15:34:03","slug":"protests-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2011\/12\/22\/protests-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Protests in China"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Thomas Galvez via flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Yemen. Spain. \u00a0United States.\u00a0 Many authors have claimed that protests in these and other countries can be seen as a worldwide movement against inequality.\u00a0 And, recent New York Time<\/em>s articles<\/a> add another pin on the world map of protest movements by covering recent protests in Wukan, China, over land seizures.\u00a0 According to one article, protests in China are becoming increasingly common,<\/p>\n

\u2026a reflection of the widening income gap and deepening unhappiness with official corruption and an unresponsive legal system. But the clashes in Wukan, which first erupted in September, are unusual for their longevity \u2014 and for the brazenness of the villagers as they call attention to their frustrations. Despite the government\u2019s best efforts to control social media outlets, such frustrations have only grown as millions of Chinese gain access to unofficial sources of information and use new tools to organize protests.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Public scenes of dissatisfaction are comparatively rare in China. But last year, there were as many as 180,000 outbursts of what sociologists call<\/a> \u201cmass incidents,\u201d including strikes, sit-ins, rallies, and violent clashes.\u00a0 (For comparison, in the mid-1990s, there were fewer than 10,000.)<\/p>\n

People don\u2019t have sufficient faith in legal procedures or the media and feel they have no redress when bad things are done to them,\u201d said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who studies Chinese social trends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of the protests are a response to worsening pollution, while others are a response to police brutality.\u00a0 Much of the unrest, including in Wukan, is in response to the seizure of land by private developers or government officials.<\/p>\n

The discontent in Wukan has been simmering for more than a decade. Residents say land seizures began in the late 1990s, when officials began selling off farmland for industrial parks and apartment complexes. Villagers say more than 1,000 acres have been seized and resold to developers in the past decade or so. \u00a0The residents\u2019 ire exploded in September, when thousands of people took to the streets to protest the sale of a village-owned pig farm for luxury housing that netted the government $156 million.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rest of the article gives more detail on the specific incidents in Wakun. \u00a0But, multiple recent new stories on protests in China posit that these events are not isolated and are instead connected across China. \u00a0And, to some, these protests are connected to others across borders and oceans as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Yemen. Spain. \u00a0United States.\u00a0 Many authors have claimed that protests in these and other countries can be seen as a worldwide movement against inequality.\u00a0 And, recent New York Times articles add another pin on the world map of protest movements by covering recent protests in Wukan, China, over land seizures.\u00a0 According to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39110,1046,12609,807],"class_list":["post-2647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-inequality","tag-international","tag-occupy-wall-street","tag-socialmovement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2647"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2658,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions\/2658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}