Sydney Morning Herald China correspondent John Garnaut writes:

State of defiance

A new civic society dedicated to protecting its interests is springing up in China faster than the Communist Party can push it back down.

Chinese officials are fond of telling foreign journalists that we should dispel our prejudices by going down to the countryside and seeing "the real China". The trouble is, when I heed this advice, the realities of China's money politics, ever-expanding political-security apparatus and disregard for its own laws often turn out to be more serious than I previously imagined.

In Heilongjiang province, up against the Russian border, what had looked to be an ordinary land dispute proved to be an epic battle where officials had confiscated thousands of hectares of land from more than 40,000 farmers and rented it back to them like feudal lords.

I was shown an X-ray of a dispossessed peasant's skull, with a bullet in it. I was told the guns were in the hands of mafia gangs who had been brought in by the area's biggest rural landlord, who derived his power from his former role as the local Communist Party security chief.

The mafia and the local government had become one and the same, protected by a web of bribes and bureaucratic loyalties at each superior tier of government.

And in Tangshan city, a middle-class woman called Liu Yuhong told us how she had travelled to Beijing during the tense occasion of last year's 60th anniversary National Day military parade. She had wanted to lodge a "petition", or official complaint, seeking to learn the whereabouts of her parents who were being held in a labour camp (they had been detained for "petitioning" over a trivial property dispute).

Liu was taken by police, handed to private security operatives and dumped in an exposed row of bare concrete cells, where she was starved of food and water for five days. Liu's face was beaten until the walls were speckled red and she was force-fed an unknown fluid until she vomited. She later miscarried on a concrete prison floor.

Liu's case is gruesome but not unique. The extra-legal kidnapping of petitioners, subjecting them to abusive treatment and storing them in "black jails" is now commonplace. In fact, it is one of China's fastest-growing industries. One private security company, Andingyuan, employed 3000 people to kidnap petitioners in Beijing on behalf of local governments, in daylight, until it was shut down two months ago.

One point to make about these abuses of power is that we are finding out a lot more about them. We learned about the black jail company because Chinese journalists wrote about it. I found out about the petitioner Liu Yuhong because she had posted her story on the internet. The Heilongjiang farmers publicised their dispute with the help of democracy activists in Beijing.

These days you can discover a fair bit about "real China" by simply having an internet connection, despite the vast and growing propaganda and censorship apparatus that tries to stop the Communist Party from looking bad. Ordinary people are recording the daily abuses of police and officials - often with their mobile phones and sometimes with video cameras that you can buy in Beijing in the shape of a shirt button for $35 - and exposing them on microblogs.

"My father is Li Gang," said the son of a district deputy police chief, boasting as to why he would never be brought to justice for running over and killing a student. That phrase became instantly famous across China and is now shorthand for shirking any sort of responsibility.

Chinese living standards are rising astonishingly fast but Chinese expectations are rising even faster. People who not long ago were faceless "masses" and "peasants" are gaining personal independence and economic leverage, becoming exposed to the information world and developing a sense of entitlement about what the state should do for them - or at least what it should stop doing to them.

A new civic society, including a class of genuinely professional journalists, lawyers and scholars, is springing up to represent their interests faster than the state can push it back down. [...]

It is not at all clear how this is eventually going to work out. Garnaut reports that the government spent 514 billion yuan (£49 billion) on domestic security last year, almost as much as it spent on its military. As Stein's law puts it, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. But what then?

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It is not at all clear how this is eventually going to work out. Garnaut reports that the government spent 514 billion yuan (£49 billion) on domestic security last year, almost as much as it spent on its military. As Stein's law puts it, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. But what then?

Slightly misquoting Terry Pratchett, "nothing goes on forever, but then forever is a long time".

People have been saying "this can't possibly continue" about the Middle East for pretty much 100 years, but here we are all the same.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Slightly misquoting Terry Pratchett, "nothing goes on forever, but then forever is a long time". People have been saying "this can't possibly continue" about the Middle East for pretty much 100 years, but here we are all the same.

I can't find a reference to Pratchett writing that in Google or in Google Books. Where is it? Herb Stein formulated his "law" somewhere in the 1980s.

A shorter time than forever can still be a very long time. If the European powers, Russia, China and America stopped interfering in the Middle East, from Israel and Palestine through to Pakistan, who knows what forms of societies would emerge in a century from now?

Who would have thought in 1910 that China would be the way it is today? Or indeed, who would have thought in 1810 that Britain would be the way it was in 1910?

I think it's in this one:
My point wasn't to disagree with Stein (though I do), but to point out that there's nothing necessarily untenable in the current situation in China.

So they've got the internet. Big deal. So have we and we're not going to overthrow our governments either. Practically no one in a China is agitating for large scale political change. They just want less corruption and to come out ahead in their property deals, but then who doesn't? The central government just blames it all on the provincial governments, and it's pretty much right to do so. It could try to reform them, but it wouldn't work.

Besides which, there's no clear line of separation between the rulers and the ruled. As soon as anyone gets successful enough he's coopted into the system at the relevant level. Even in tiny villages you've got the mayor, the council etc. You can have a revolution against the evil landlords in their castles easily enough. It's way more difficult to have one against Lao Wang who owes you 50 kuai at poker and came to your daughter's wedding.

Sure, people like Mrs Liu who write cheques that their guanxi can't cash are going to get into trouble and there's injustice everywhere, but pretty much 90% of the world is the same.

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Besides which, there's no clear line of separation between the rulers and the ruled. As soon as anyone gets successful enough he's coopted into the system at the relevant level. Even in tiny villages you've got the mayor, the council etc. You can have a revolution against the evil landlords in their castles easily enough. It's way more difficult to have one against Lao Wang who owes you 50 kuai at poker and came to your daughter's wedding.

Yes, that is what is especially interesting about it. The government spends huge sums on internal security but there is no possibility of a revolutionary movement. As I see it from here, the dissidents are not asking for abolition of the Ancien Régime but that the present regime is required to work a whole lot better.