Primary Sources

Foreign Affairs What Would Mao Do? A wave of social unrest is sweeping across China—in the past two years, the number of public protests has risen by nearly 50 percent—and the government has been “unable or unwilling” to control the eruptions, according to a new report prepared by the Congressional Research Service and obtained by Secrecy News (an online newsletter covering security and intelligence policy).

Unlike the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, or the ongoing struggle between the government and the religious sect Falun Gong, the current protests are driven primarily by economic concerns. Peasants and farmers are unhappy with the environmental degradation, official corruption, and decline in employment and social services that followed the decollectivization of state agriculture, and they are resisting the government’s attempts to seize property and force evictions for infrastructure projects. More troubling, from Beijing’s point of view, is agitation in the industrial sector, where workers ...