Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In March, as China prepared for the August Olympics, mass protests broke out in Tibet. On March 10, Buddhist monks began a nonviolent street demonstration against ethno-religious restrictions and were met by arrests and beatings. On March 14, as the protests continued, Chinese police started to beat up protesting monks in the Barkhor Market in the old city of Lhasa, this in broad daylight. Witnessing this atrocity, long-abused area residents rose up, stoning police, attacking and burning Chinese-owned shops, and then setting fire to police cars and fire trucks, all the while waving Tibetan flags. It is now being reported that at least 80 people have died, the greatest toll in a social conflict since 1989.

Members of another ethno-religious minority, the predominantly Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) have also been restive. In March, Chinese authorities arrested several Uighurs, whom they claimed had tried to hijack a plane, perhaps as a practice run for a terrorist attack against the Olympics. But Rebeeya Kadeer, a Uighur democratic activist in exile, discounted these reports as state propaganda designed to justify continuing repression in Xinjiang.

In recent months, the government has also cracked down on Han Chinese human rights activists, most notably Hu Jia of Shanghai, who has worked to support peasants and workers against exploitation by capital and the state. Many Chinese were shocked by another incident in January, when “citizen journalist” Wei Wenhua was beaten to death by security police after he began to film on his cellphone their attack upon peasant protestors in Hubei Province.

A new labor law effective January 1 has slightly expanded worker’s rights, at least on paper. With independent unions and strikes still illegal, workers are finding another avenue of action, “citizens agents.” These self-taught labor lawyers charge small contingency fees to represent workers who have been unjustly fired, who have not been paid for months, or who have experienced other common forms of abuse.

Among the most exploited are China’s 150 million migrant workers, concentrated in industrial zones like Guangzhou. Mass anger burst out early this year, when unusually severe snowstorms shut down railroads for days during Chinese New Year, the only time of the year that most of these migrant workers are able to visit home. Such failures undermine the authoritarian state’s very raison d’être, its claim of economic and managerial “efficiency.”

Overall, social tensions are rising in 2008, even as the whole world is watching during the preparations for the Olympics. These tensions have certainly not reached pre-revolutionary proportions. Nonetheless, the events in Tibet must be particularly troubling to the rulers. For as Lenin -- who certainly knew about revolutions and uprisings -- wrote in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916): “The socialist revolution may break out not only in consequence of a great strike, a street demonstration, a hunger riot, a mutiny in the armed forces, or a colonial rebellion, but also in consequence of any political crisis, like the Dreyfus affair... or in connection with a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc.”