Why China Is Silencing Internal Victims Of Tainted Milk
China’s government is doing its best to silence the internal victims of the melamine-tainted milk scandal, most notably by putting serious pressure on lawyers representing the families whose children have died from ingesting it to resign from the case. Even though I am no fan of China, Jack Huang implored me to take a more objective look at the country and here is what I found.
China’s government is not cracking down on the victims of this scandal because it is evil. It is cracking down on them because this could turn into the perfect storm that sweeps the Communist Party from power. It is the same reason that they channeled nationalism into a strong, fervent force to assist those adversely impacted in the Sichuan earthquake. Any catastrophe that happens in this day and age could morph into a whirlwind in Chinese society that causes an uproar of dissent that the government cannot control and could dethrone it.
Back in the simpler days before the Internet, a Chinese analyst whose name I cannot recall put it best: “Even if everyone dancing did not like the square dance, it did not matter because the caller had the microphone.” The technological revolutions of the last ten to fifteen years have changed all of that dramatically. Now that Chinese society has access to the Internet (of course it is censored but there’s only so much censoring you can do without rendering it useless and creating a riot over that issue) every Chinese citizen that has access to the Internet has a microphone. That makes crises like the melamine-tainted milk one pushing the line for “social harmony” (i.e. the government staying in power) into the red zone.
Anything that could cause the population to spontaneously join together and use what little communication tools they have available to them to coordinate mass protests that could get out of hand and result in the overthrow of the Chinese government is something that the Chinese government is going to react to harshly because, literally, their very survival is on the line. If this tainted milk scandal causes a Tienanmen Square (and actually, it would likely be worse because when your relatives die because of tainted food you’re more likely to get violent in large numbers than when you are protesting for democracy) the Chinese government will be on the ropes.
After the showdown at Tienanmen Square and the later lesson that the Soviet military refused to fire on its own civilians, the Chinese created a special police force to deal with violent protests and that are trained to have no compunctions about killing civilians if need be. Believe it or not, violent protests are a nearly daily event in China but, fortunately for the government, they are widespread and over very local issues that do not band large groups of people across the country together. This makes them like small brushfires: easily put out. The potential event that makes the Chinese government leaders lay awake at night is the rarest and most destructive of all violent protests: the wildfire.
The wildfire that makes the Chinese government paranoid is the event that reaches out and touches hundreds of millions of the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens and sends them into one huge riot against the government with a legitimate purpose. It is this event that would require the dispatch of all the special police forces that usually tamp down riots and force the Chinese government to call out the People’s Liberation Army and order them to start killing civilians until the civilians recognize the government’s authority again. It is at this point that the PLA could decide they are taking orders from a paper dragon, side with the people and overthrow their civilian leaders. China is now into its second leader that did not serve in the PLA (Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both served in the PLA and thus were able to take its support for their rule for granted while Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have not and, thus, cannot take the PLA’s support for granted) and each non-PLA leader gets more and more paranoid that the PLA will use that fact against them to seize power. Frankly, I think there is reason to be paranoid but that is just my two cents.
They are also cracking down extra hard because they are concerned that their “gentlemen’s agreement” with the people is going sour. The “gentlemen’s agreement” is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will grow the economy by 7% minimum per year and the people will accept party rule. This tainted milk scandal could not have come at a worse time because China’s biggest consumer economy, the United States, is teetering on the brink of financial disaster itself which is likely to drive down the goods they buy from China and endanger that 7% growth number. If the “gentlemen’s agreement” is off between the CCP and the people, then all hell could break loose.
So, just to give a little insight into the Chinese government, they are not evil Communists and these crackdowns are not coming because they are evil Communists. These crackdowns are a product of the CCP leaders fearing a popular backlash in which the military displaces them as the leaders of the country and the CCP leaders pay not only with their personal fortunes but the lives of them and their families as the PLA institutes “rough justice” to appease the population. Don’t hold it against them: it’s just self-preservation.
