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July 07, 2005
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Dealing with it
One senior CCP member talking about democracy might be an abberation, but two smacks of something bigger. And this is big. The SCMP (full article below the jump) says another senior CCP member, Zhou Yongkang, acknowledged rising social unrest and rightly attributed these protests to economic and social rather than political factors. The key question comes from the article: Sixteen years after the Tiananmen crackdown, has it dawned on the mainland leadership that protesters may not be out to undermine Communist Party rule but often have legitimate grievances about economic inequalities and social injustice?Who said the CCP were slow learners? The first part of dealing with a problem is admitting you have one. It seems like there has been a massive shift in the leadership's thinking. Civil unrest, left unchecked, could potentially topple the CCP. The CCP have the choice of dealing with the problems or ignoring them. They've chosen the former. What are the problems they need to grapple with? Corruption, the income gap between rural and urban areas, growing inequality, a fairer balance of land use, better defined property rights and improving living standards to name a few. But the CCP has figured it's better to deal with it than let it fester. The question becomes do they have the solutions? Do they have the guts to take on the vested interests, both internal and external, to deal with social and economic tensions? Or could this be the first crack in the CCP's edifice? Other reading Richard reaches similar conclusions. Acceptance of rights replacing reflex fear of protestsposted by Simon on 07.07.05 at 10:38 AM in the
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