The Chinese class struggle

Chinese leaked official figures revealed that there were at least 128,000 instances of ‘mass unrest’ throughout the country in 2011 – with mass unrest being defined as 15 or more people in some provinces, and 50 or more in others, violently protesting against the regime, mainly at the local official level. That’s around 350 instances of mass unrest each day, rising from just a few dozen a decade ago.

China spent over $US115 billion on the People’s Armed Police, a one-million strong and military-trained organisation whose sole purpose is to control domestic unrest throughout the country. The PAP is distinct from the People’s Liberation Army. Officially, the amount Beijing spends on internal security (i.e. on the PAP) exceeds what it spends on national defence (i.e. the PLA) (althoughindependent analysts believes that Beijing is significantly under-calculating its true PLA expenditure). 15 per cent of the annual fiscal budget for the Chinese central government is allocated to controlling mass unrest throughout the country. This does not even include the further resources spent on other forms of coercion and monitoring by the central and local governments in China.

Using the commonly accepted standard of the Gini-coefficient (GN) of measuring inequality by distribution of income (where ‘0’ is perfect equality and ‘1’ is perfect inequality), China’s official score is 0.47. The majority of experts, including researchers from the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believe that the true figure is between 0.5 and 0.57. The World Bank’s standard of poverty is those people living on less than $US1.25 per day. By this standard, about 13.5 per cent of Chinese live in poverty. Since the mid-1990s, poverty reduction in China has advanced at less than 1 per cent each year. 

China possesses 250 million migration workers from rural areas. These economic migrants work in the cities but are registered as rural residents under the hukou registration system – meaning that they have limited rights to education, health and other government services presented to registered urban residents. Migrant workers cannot afford urban housing, but even if they could, there are subject to restrictions on purchasing urban property – a further reason why so many of the luxury apartments in China will remain without tenants.