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To: regli who wrote (58921)	4/20/2006 5:21:19 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Your reports are intriguing Regli - but when I read about the poor farmer in Pudong who just had a honda dealership go up on land that he was growing his family's rice on - I wonder how they reached him for those surveys - he has no phone eh? How did they talk to him and get his feelings on china's coming wealth. I agree Chen probably a very good read on China Business - how many of the protests do you think he has been too? As your ivory tower is toppling that is kinda too late to look at the barbarians coming for you eh? cbsnews.com But nowhere does the image of China as the Next Big Threat jar with reality more than in China itself, where economic, social and environmental upheaval has turned the country into a caldron. For now at least, the Chinese regime is a greater threat to its own population, unmoored and angry, than it is to the United States or even its neighbors. Popular unrest is now a common feature of China's political landscape, with more than 74,000 reported cases of unrest in 2005, according to an official count. The same economy that has grown by nearly 10 percent a year for the past 25 years has also become a perilous source of discontent. Take the December riots in the southern Chinese city of Dongshan, when riot police fired on villagers as they protested the seizure of their land to make room for a power plant. Some 20 people were killed, according to witnesses, in the first such lethal show of force since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The clash in Dongshan was only the latest in a running nationwide feud between local authorities and angry Chinese uprooted or marginalized by the country's unbridled economic expansion. Just last week, violent protest erupted in Bo Mei, a village in southern Guangdong province, when authorities tried to destroy unauthorized water dikes. Some two dozen people were wounded in clashes with riot police. alertnet.org Pollution fuelling social unrest -Chinese official 20 Apr 2006 04:43:40 GMT BEIJING, April 20 (Reuters) - China's environment chief has made a rare official admission that serious water and air pollution is fuelling social tensions, protests and riots. "The environment has become a focal issue that triggers social contradictions," Thursday's edition of the Beijing News quoted Zhou Shengxian, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), as saying. "Mass incidents" -- protests and riots in the ruling Communist Party's jargon -- over environmental woes have grown at an annual rate of 29 percent in recent years, he said. After two decades of breakneck economic growth, China has 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities, the World Bank says. An estimated 300 million nationwide have no access to clean water. Zhou was appointed in December after his predecessor was forced to resign over his handling of a toxic spill that poisoned the Songhua River, a source of drinking water for millions. The degradation of the environment has increasingly galvanised citizens across the country into violent actions because of the slim chance of redress through legal channels. Zhou did not give an exact number for the protests, but said there were 51,000 pollution "disputes" last year alone. Thousand of villagers rioted in Zhejiang province last April, forcing the closure of 13 polluting chemical plants. About 50 policemen were injured and four protesters were later jailed. Zhou blamed an obsession with economic growth, slack law enforcement and "soft" laws for the serious environment risks that had resulted in 76 "sudden environment incidents" since November, or one in every two days.