Hu Jintao's legacy of social control...
Insight: In China, security drive sows own seeds of unrest
uk.reuters.com
(Reuters) - The rebel village of Wukan waits surrounded by what will be one of Chinese President Hu Jintao's most far-reaching yet contested legacies: a vast build-up of the domestic security apparatus that critics say feeds the discontent it was designed to defuse.
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"China has always been a heavily controlled place, but what's new is the scale of it, the way in which the government has pushed this as an alternative to the emergence of a real civil society," said Bakken, at the University of Hong Kong.
China's projected budget in 2011 for domestic "public security" - a gauge of spending on "security preservation" - outstripped the defense budget for the first time.
The 13.8 percent jump in China's planned budget for police, state security, armed civil militia, courts and jails brought planned spending on law and order items by the central and local governments to 624 billion yuan ($98 billion) - more than twice the GDP of Uruguay.
China's Ministry of Finance said last month that the growing budget for public security was normal and included items other than "security preservation," Xinhua reported.
But Xie, the Shanghai scholar, said the ministry's own definitions and data showed the "public security" budget goes overwhelmingly to anti-riot forces, police and other law-and-order agencies.
"Denying that stability preservation is a large and growing outlay for the government simply isn't true," said Xie.
The spending jump has paid for more police, surveillance cameras, and anti-riot forces brandishing advanced equipment. Over 104 billion yuan of the public security budget went to the People's Armed Police, the domestic militia, Caijing magazine, a Chinese publication, reported last month. |
