Thugs For Hire Hint at a More Unstable China
Beijing’s practice of tamping down dissent will be harder to enforce if the economy continues to go south.
It’s a tug-of-war to keep the economy on track.
Source: AFP/Getty Images
Videos of unidentified men attacking a protest by bank customers in the city of Zhengzhou while uniformed police stood by have caused outrage on Chinese social media. The violence is a demonstration of how authorities in the Communist Party-ruled nation can revert to the crudest methods of social control when confronted with resistance. It may not be the last such episode as a flailing economy raises the prospect of widening financial distress.
The shock is understandable. Zhengzhou is hardly some village backwater run by rogue officials. It’s the capital of Henan province, China’s third-most populous, and home to more than 10 million people. It’s also the site of the world’s largest iPhone factory, a state-of-the-art facility where assembler Foxconn Technology Group employs tens of thousands of people. Yet the treatment meted out to the defrauded bank protesters is far from unprecedented. Usually, though, such tactics are targeted at the most marginalized members of society and often in darkness, far from the eyes of China’s upwardly mobile urban middle classes.