Rural Chinese peasants rioted 74,000 times last
year. That is 203 times per day. Chinese protest mainly about their
land. It is taken from them, or polluted by corrupt local officials,
or both. Last week, in a Mainland Chinese village across the Deep Bay
from Hong Kong, 20 people were shot dead by the military. Authorities
used teargas at first. Farmers retaliated with homemade explosives,
and then the shooting began.
Most of the riots in China are by environmentalists,
as was this one in large part. Villagers were protesting against the
construction of a coal-fired power plant. They feared its pollution
and were angry that a mountaintop was detonated to provide construction
rubble.
Rural Americans rioted not at all last year. That
is no times per day. Coal companies in Appalachia explode mountaintops
in order to get to the coal underneath and then push the top off the
side and into the streams and canyons below. In some areas, there are
no mountaintops left. But there are no riots. Americans are passive.
Chinese activism has a virility that should shame
Americans. Our bumpersticks are like blanks in a gun. Why are we not
sufficiently angry? Change only comes after anger.
A few months ago I was walking into my favorite
sushi bar when I noticed by the door sign that said that Yellowtail
and Tuna were poisoned with mercury and that pregnant women shouldn’t
eat it at all and others should only eat a stingy portion. I got steaming
angry. Those coal-fired bastards poisoned my Toro sashimi, they took
away my hamachi and I got angry. Apparently you can denude a man’s
forests, poison his aquifer, dump Nuclear waste off his beaches, but
when you go after his spicy tuna, he goes crazy.
I walked into the sushi bar and accosted my tablemates
with the mercury information, but they failed to anger. They just kept
sitting there, drinking their bad water, eating mercury sashimi, their
hearts pumping chemical blood–unangry.
We have a surfeit of media to cover our lack
of anger, but China has no media to cover its 74,000 riots. This is
the reason that our nudging can produce minor political movement and
74,000 riots a year in China cannot. A media savvy American protester
can stage a great image and have it re-broadcast over and over again
into the minds of viewers. An entire Chinese village could rampage against
government and nobody would know.
A recent article in the New York Times detailed
how the Chinese government keeps the press from reporting riots. After
the riots in Guangdong Province last week, propaganda apparatchiks imposed
a news blackout on editors across China. Internet search engines had
links to Guangdong blocked or expunged. Western news sites were also
blocked after accounts of the riots began to appear on them.
Americans know that there were 74,000 riots in China
last year – but Chinese don’t. They don’t know that their
brothers and sisters in the next province are also fighting the corrupt
pollutocracy. They must think that they are all alone. But still they
fight, alone in the darkness, their mouths gagged, their ears plugged,
their eyes glued, clawing forward, always forward, despite the bullets.