China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
By Paul Wiseman
USA TODAY
22 November 2005
The rent-a-thug business, along with the rest of the economy, is booming in China.
Young toughs with few prospects for marriage or meaningful employment can find work at a respectable wage beating and intimidating lawyers, activists, journalists and ordinary citizens who challenge corrupt village leaders and wealthy business owners.
"It is common, and it is becoming worse and worse," says Lu Banglie, a pro-democracy activist who was beaten by thugs last month after trying to help villagers oust an unpopular local leader across the border from Hong Kong.
So far, the communist government in Beijing has been unwilling or unable to curb local autocrats who hire henchmen to silence critics.
The increasing use of hired muscle in China "is a sign that society is becoming completely lawless," says Robin Munro, research director of the China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group that helps mediate labor disputes. "It's a shocking development in a country that is growing as fast as China."
Strong-arm tactics
The rise of henchmen-for-hire reflects the peculiar characteristics of a society lurching from communist control to Darwinian capitalism. China's economy is booming, but its justice system hasn't caught up. Judges are untrained, often corrupt and beholden to local communist officials. (Related story: Brazen beatings expose local practice)
Issues of land ownership are often blurry, allowing rapacious local officials to seize communal property — or simply evict farmers — and sell it to developers, pocketing money that belongs in village coffers, says Nicholas Becquelin, research director in Hong Kong for the activist group Human Rights in China, which is based in New York.
The land grabs and corruption are feeding unrest in the countryside.
Encouraging the rise of stronger tactics:
• Police are struggling to keep order amid growing public unrest. Unable to rely on the courts for justice, peasants have been taking their protests to the streets, occasionally with violent results.
Nationwide, the number of "mass incidents" (various kinds of protests) has risen steadily — from 8,700 in 1993 to 32,000 in 1999 to 74,000 last year, says Murray Scot Tanner, a Rand Corp. analyst who studies social unrest in China.
Local Chinese governments, with paltry tax bases, have little money to beef up police forces to crush dissent.
Tanner says some parts of rural China have fewer than five police officers for every 10,000 people (vs. about 24 officers for every 10,000 in the USA). So hiring hooligans on an ad hoc basis makes financial sense for local officials trying to keep the peasants in line.
Hiring plainclothes hooligans allows local strongmen to deny responsibility for violence.
Beijing lawyer Jiang Tianyong says if government critics "are beaten by people in uniform, they've got the right to complain and possibly to sue the government. But if they are beaten up by people in plainclothes, all they can do is file a police report."
• China has a vast pool of potential heavies: millions of frustrated bachelors.
In a country where boys traditionally have been valued over girls and the government restricts couples to one or two children, many couples abort female fetuses to give themselves another chance for a boy. Result: About 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. That means millions of young Chinese men will never marry.
Many young Chinese men with no marriage prospects — known as guang guan or "bare branches" — have drifted into the thug-for-hire trade.
"When you have sizable numbers of bare branches, it becomes relatively easy to have your personal army of goons," says Brigham Young University political scientist Valerie Hudson, co-author of Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population.
"There will be goons in any society, but consider a situation in which about 15% of your young men are surplus — the possibilities of using them for force-work increases."
Publicity but no action
In two cases — one in Guangdong province just across the border from Hong Kong and one 800 miles north in Shandong province — villagers and activists involved in protests were beaten back by a combination of tough government and thug tactics.
In Guangdong, an attempt to recall a leader was repressed. Activists and journalists who went to check on the situation were beaten by hired hooligans.
In Shandong, a blind man who tried to take the local government to court for ordering the sterilization of women who have more than two children, was put under house arrest and assaulted by men who had been hired to prevent him from taking legal action.
Both cases were made public, but the central government in Beijing did not act.
"This stuff is getting enormous publicity. But nobody's been detained for abuse of power," Rand Corp. analyst Tanner says. "The fact that (Chinese President) Hu Jintao is not cracking down on these cases, even though they've been publicized in the West, frankly makes one wonder how seriously they take the rule of law."
For now, the threat of beatings and intimidation usually is sufficient to smother dissent from ordinary people. "Terror works," labor activist Munro says. "Physical violence, or the threat of it, will do it every time for most people."