A reader writes:
I, and many others with more than a passing acquaintance with China, tend to react to articles like Paul Bonicelli's with an exasperated sigh. While events like the recent environmental protest in Dalian are heartening, the tendency of many American and European policy analysts to frame it in terms of whether the "stoic Chinese" (a phrase I find somewhat distasteful) have finally had enough, the clock is running out on the Chinese Communist Party, and that through massive protests democracy in China is, literally, on the march.
The Dalian protest is an almost picture-perfect replay of the 2007 protests in Xiamen.
In both cases, relatively prosperous middle-class people organized through technology (SMS and blogs in 2007, Twitter-like microblogs like Weibo in 2011) to stage a peaceful NIMBY protest against a polyxylene plant (yes, it was even the same type of chemical plant) in what is considered on of China's cleaner, greener cities. A good account of the Xiamen protest can be found here. It is certainly a fascinating example of civil disobedience and public expression that merits attention. But to tie it to democracy by pointing to various other protests that have happened over the past decade is tenuous at best.
For starters, protests in China are almost without exception highly localized and do not target the Communist Party or the government as a whole, but specific actions and often specific local officials or government agencies. Issues rarely overlap or invoke one another. While Dalian and Xiamen featured middle-class folks in peaceful march with t-shirts, banners, and bottled water, the Yilishen ant farming protests in 2007 involved thousands of violent poorer folks who were cheated in a massive pyramid scheme supported by local government. The Lhasa riots of 2008 and Urumqi riots of 2009 were about racial tensions and government development policies perceived as a threat by ethnic minorities.
While there's definitely mutual sympathy (less so in the case of Xinjiang and Tibet's ethnic strife) and recognition that others plights share the same underlying causes – corruption and unaccountability chief among them – most people don't translate this into a radical political philosophy or platform, unless they are the rare academic like Liu Xiaobo who attempts to draft a manifesto. Even then, the spirit of these various "mass incidents" is that people are upset about a specific, concrete problem, and are seeking redress, not political theories or organizations.
And that gets to the heart of why this isn't "democratization." Democratization requires institutions, and none of these protests are aimed at systemic change or demanding new mechanisms or political reform. In fact, I believe that while many if not most Chinese citizens recognize that there are systemic cancers on the body politic, the idea of organizing en masse to push for such radical reforms is seen as either foolhardy because a fatalistic belief it couldn't succeed, impractical when life already offers so many more immediate problems like financial security and family obligations, or dangerous because there's still an acute memory of how horribly wrong idealistic revolution can go.
The Dish 