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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 2-Feb-08
Catastrophic snow storm could potentially destabilize Chinese government

Web Log - February, 2008

Catastrophic snow storm could potentially destabilize Chinese government

Xinhua: People are "dark, cold and hungry in dead cities," especially in hard-hit Hunan province in southeast China.

Even worse, tens of millions of migrant workers, who can visit their families only once a year, during the lunar new year celebrations, will instead spend their holidays stranded in train stations. According to CNN, there are over a million stranded would-be passengers in Beijing train station alone.

The snow storm, the worst since 1954, has created a national crisis. It's delayed food and coal transports, causing power outages and significant new food price increases in half of China's provinces.

According to China's official Xinhua news agency, Chinese meteorologists blame the snowstorm on La Niña. It has hit 19 provinces in southern and central China, has killed more than 60 people and forced nearly 1.8 million people to relocate over the past three weeks, inflicting economic losses of about 53.9 billion yuan (US $7.5).

News reports indicate that this snow storm is a monumental crisis of historic proportions, with enormous destruction, including the caving in of many homes and buildings. And the snow is expected to continue for another week.

Many of those stranded are migrant workers. There are well over 100 million migrant workers in China. Most of them come from rural areas, where the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has confiscated small farms and turned them over to government-controlled agricultural conglomerates. Young people were forced to move to large cities to become temporary workers, sending money back to their families.

China and its provinces <font face=Arial size=-2>(Source: The Economist)</font>

China and its provinces (Source: The Economist)

Migrants and other disadvantaged groups are already infuriated at the huge income disparities versus the CCP élite. They would form a powerful core group of protesters leading a rebellion against the CCP, in a country with a repeated history of exactly that kind of rebellion. And ironically, the hardest hit province, Hunan, is precisely where previous national rebellions (the Taiping Rebellion and Mao Zedong's "long march") have originated.

That a snow storm would trigger such a rebellion is pure speculation, of course. The reason for the speculation is that we all saw what happened in terms of a huge political backlash against the American government following the Katrina disaster in 2005 -- and that disaster affected only a small region of the country. The size of that backlash caught me by surprise, and it's reasonable to believe it can happen elsewhere.

The snow storm apparently has caused a similar amount of devastation in China, but in a much larger region. Between the widespread destruction from the storm, combined with the widespread fury by migrants stuck in train stations rather than visiting their families, some sort of colossal anti-CCP backlash is all but certain. Whether it ends up being just a political backlash or something more violent remains to be seen. (2-Feb-08) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 2-Feb-08 Catastrophic snow storm could potentially destabilize Chinese government

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 2-Feb-08
Catastrophic snow storm could potentially destabilize Chinese government