BEIJING (Reuters) - China faces surging protests and riots in 2009 as rising unemployment stokes discontent, a state-run magazine said in a blunt warning of the hazards to Communist Party control from a sharp economic downturn. The unusually stark report in this week's Outlook (Liaowang) Magazine, issued by the official Xinhua news agency, said faltering growth could spark anger among millions of migrant workers and university graduates left jobless. "Without doubt, now we're entering a peak period for mass incidents," a senior Xinhua reporter, Huang Huo, told the magazine, using the official euphemism for riots and protests. "In 2009, Chinese society may face even more conflicts and clashes that will test even more the governing abilities of all levels of the Party and government."
BEIJING (Reuters) - China faces surging protests and riots in 2009 as rising unemployment stokes discontent, a state-run magazine said in a blunt warning of the hazards to Communist Party control from a sharp economic downturn.
The unusually stark report in this week's Outlook (Liaowang) Magazine, issued by the official Xinhua news agency, said faltering growth could spark anger among millions of migrant workers and university graduates left jobless.
"Without doubt, now we're entering a peak period for mass incidents," a senior Xinhua reporter, Huang Huo, told the magazine, using the official euphemism for riots and protests.
"In 2009, Chinese society may face even more conflicts and clashes that will test even more the governing abilities of all levels of the Party and government."
There are a lot of educated people in China who are not going to be fooled by WesternMediaMadness (not that they don't have their own.) There are dozens or perhaps millions of individuals and families who have been actually lifted out of the mud in one or two generations, and who appreciate the troubles that such a feat causes.
Me thinks that there is an over-riding purpose of injecting an internal article like this into the public debate. It could be being used to raise the hackles of those who believe that the people steering the bus for the last couple decades deserve a chance to re-balance after all the good they have done, and after the shell shock of the current international thief-created economic mess that they have been handed.
I still think that China has turned the corner, and that they can now create their own wind...there are enough people who can consume their own creations, and enough by a long shot who can be brought to that transition state from mere survival to actual creation.
N.B.; Not that I'm wearing rose-colored mistake-hiding glasses to gross mis-alignments of eco-friendly long term decisions that could have been, or the lagging effects of biGbrotheR-itis.
Nor do I ignore that we in the West still have many opportunities to grow ourselves and our civilization in progressive ways as well.
(I must stop reading Fuentes in the morning.) Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
