Anger in China increases as the economy falls

Laid-off toy company workers smash windows and computers and overturn police cars in Guangdong province. Employees of a liquor company in Harbin come to Beijing to protest unpaid wages at their company’s headquarters. Taxi drivers, as many as 20,000 of them, scuffle with police in protests that have spread into seven provinces.

Even the police have gotten into the act: Auxiliary officers surrounded a Communist Party office in Hunan province last week to demand higher wages, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy.

As China’s economy hits the skids, such protests have thus far been sporadic and have usually involved fewer than 100 people. But in recent weeks, they spread across the country like brush fires and, according to some analysts, could spiral out of control.

“Definitely, this is the most serious problem we have seen since 1989,” said Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor of sociology at People’s University in Beijing. “You have millions of college students who can’t find jobs. ... You have migrant workers who have lost their jobs at factories and don’t have land to go back to.”

It is counter-intuitive that a global financial crisis that started with the excesses of Wall Street should be undermining the Chinese Communist Party. But academics such as Zhou believe that the economic crisis could present the Chinese leadership with its biggest political challenge since the student protests at Tiananmen Square nearly two decades ago.

To a large extent, China’s fiscal problems pale next to those of the United States. Chinese unemployment is not expected to top 4.5 percent, compared with the most recent rate of 6.5 percent in the U.S. Although the World Bank recently slashed China’s growth forecast for 2009 from more than 9 percent to 7.5 percent, even the lower figure keeps China at the top of the pack.

The problem is that ordinary growth might not be enough for a system that’s been sustained by double-digit gains over the last five years. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini predicted last month in a widely quoted newsletter that without 9 percent to 10 percent growth, China is headed for a “hard landing.”

It is the conventional wisdom that the China Communist Party’s rule has survived into the 21st century because of the nation’s extraordinary economic growth. China watchers often speak of an implicit bargain between the people and the party: Give up demands for democracy and free speech and we’ll make you rich.

“I think the leaders are scared stiff,” said Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. “Certainly the Chinese Communist Party leadership believes there is a connection between economic growth, social stability and the survival of one-party rule.”

Even members of the Chinese intelligentsia has become more vocal, demanding political change in a petition released this week that was modeled after the 1977 one that challenged the Soviet Union’s domination of Czechoslovakia. “In the world, authoritarian systems are approaching the dusk of their endings,” the charter signed by more than 300 prominent figures said.

What makes the Chinese government especially vulnerable is that the people hurting have few legitimate outlets to air grievances. Unable to vote out their leaders, strike or collect compensation from the courts, they protest. And when the police wade in, the scene can quickly turn violent.

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