The Crackdown to Come

By Willy Lam

22 August 2008


Not only have the Olympics failed to act as a catalyst for political
liberalization in China, but the regime's pre-Olympics security buildup
looks set to enable the government to crack down as hard as ever on dissent
after the Games are over. In line with the time-honored Chinese tradition
of "taking revenge after the autumn harvest," police and military
authorities are planning major reprisals against a host of troublemakers.

Punitive action has begun even before the athletes and the estimated
400,000 foreign tourists leave town. Remember the "protest zones" that
Beijing authorities set up in three local parks as testimony of the
regime's "new openness"? According to international human rights watchdogs,
several activists who have applied to hold protests have been harassed and
detained. They include two Beijing petitioners, Wu Dianyuan and Wang
Xiuying, who were last week sentenced to a one-year term of "re-education
through labor." Mr. Wu and Ms. Wang's crime: repeatedly petitioning the
authorities for having been wrongfully evicted from their Beijing homes
seven years ago.

Indeed, a good number of the strategies and institutions put into place to
ensure a fail-safe Olympics are here to stay.
Since disturbances hit Tibet and four neighboring provinces in March, the
leadership under President Hu Jintao has boosted the powers of the People's
Liberation Army, the People's Armed Police, the regular police and the
judicial apparatus in combating destabilizing forces. As a key element of
the revival of Chairman Mao Zedong's "people's warfare," Beijing and a
number of other cities have revived the vigilante and spying functions of
neighborhood committees. Municipal administrations along the coast -- and
in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang -- have recently earmarked
additional budget to maintain the "spying" functions of neighborhood
committees and similar vigilante outfits after the Olympics.

Moreover, the Politburo's Central Political and Legal Commission, China's
highest law-enforcement agency, has urged the courts and prosecutors to do
more in fulfilling the party's priority task of thwarting anti-Beijing
conspiracies and upholding sociopolitical stability.

That the courts will comply in this is evident from a just-released article
by the President of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Shengjun. Writing in
this week's edition of the official Seeking Truth journal, Mr. Wang said:
"We must pay more attention to maintaining state security and social
stability. . . We must boost our consciousness of [safeguarding] the power
of the regime . . . and fully develop our functions as a department for
[proletarian] dictatorship."

Recent vows made by senior judicial cadres about doing the bidding of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are indicative of the Hu leadership's
long-term game plan of using the judicial apparatus against the party's
foes. In numerous political campaigns waged by the CCP in recent decades,
prosecutors and judges have played a pivotal role in "expediting" the
incrimination of "counterrevolutionaries."

The CCP leadership also is beefing up its campaign against "splittist
elements," particularly in Xinjiang. In three separate attacks in western
Xinjiang between August 4 and 12, ruffians described by Chinese authorities
as "terrorists" killed 20 PAP officers and police.

In a televised conference earlier this week, a high-ranking member of the
Xinjiang CCP Committee, Zhu Hailun, indicated that the authorities would
step up their "military struggle" against the "three evil forces" of
separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. "We must use iron-fisted
methods to hit out at the disruptive activities [of separatists]," said Mr.
Zhu, who is responsible for law and order in the restive region. "We shall
take the initiative in attacking [the evil forces], hit them wherever they
show up, and launch pre-emptive strikes against them."


Mr. Zhu's stern rhetoric has left no doubt that Beijing has ruled out any
compromise with underground Uighur groups, many of which are merely seeking
autonomous rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution, not outright
independence. Instead, President Hu had in early summer ordered more
People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police reinforcements into
Xinjiang and Tibet. These deployments have been confirmed by a Liberation
Army Daily story earlier this month, which said that crack units from the
Air Force of the Nanjing Military Region, which is responsible for the
Taiwan Strait, had taken part in recent war games in Xinjiang.

Apart from hitting out at dissidents, petitioners and secessionist
elements, the CCP leadership is buttressing its capacities to handle "mass
incidents," a code word for riots and disturbances staged by peasants and
workers who bear grudges against the authorities. The party journal
Fortnightly Chat pointed out last week that "a rash of mass incidents have
suddenly erupted, and they have rung the bell of alarm for [the viability
of] grassroots administrations."

Many of these incidents have to do with peasants whose land has been
grabbed by corrupt officials, or workers and migrant laborers who have been
deprived of their pensions and other rightful benefits. Confrontation
between the masses and police is tipped to rise owing to recent
difficulties in the economy. Some 67,000 medium-sized enterprises folded in
the first half of the year. And the livelihood of workers and farmers has
been rendered more difficult by inflation that is hovering between 6% and
7%.

Growing instability on various fronts has predisposed the Hu leadership
toward strengthening the police-state apparatus that has been put together
in the name of ensuring a trouble-free Olympics. Moreover, cadres in the
law-and-order establishment, who include senior officials in the Central
Political and Legal Commission as well as military, police and judicial
departments, have gained immense clout, not to mention much more funding,
since early this year.

These units have used their extra budgets to hire tens of thousands of new
staff, in addition to acquiring hardware that includes state-of-the-art
antiriot gear and hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras and related
equipment. It is in the vested interests of this fast-expanding
law-and-order establishment to play up the imperative of eradicating
"enemies of the party," whether real or imagined.

All of which together bodes ill for the prospects of a post-Olympics thaw
for China's aggrieved residents and political dissidents.
---
Mr. Lam is a Hong Kong-based China scholar and author of "Chinese Politics
in the Hu Jintao Era" (M.E. Sharpe, 2006).
The Wall Street Journal Asia