Sunshine Blues

There’s a much-quoted figure floating around out there in the giant, messy mass that is the China-watching community concerning “mass incidents”. Various numbers are cited, but the one that tends to pop up most often is a report by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security stating that there were 87,000 “mass incidents” in China in 2005. “Mass incident” is usually understood by those making a point using the number to mean “protest”, like we think of a protest in the US. Roland at EastSouthWestNorth does an absolutely fantastic job deconstructing what exactly that number actually means and what exactly is meant by “mass incident” here. It’s a really, really, detailed rundown, so I recommend clicking the link only if you’ve got a spare half hour to kill. To paraphrase him: despite the fact that the number is often cited as a source of rising danger to the CCP, the folks over at Zhongnanhai probably aren’t losing a whole lot of sleep at night over the overwhelming majority of these so-called “mass incidents”.

So where am I going with this? Well, right out back of my luxury apartment complex (Wow, the plumbing’s on the outside of the walls! Now this is living!) our little community has staged its very own mass incident.

All this for a big hole in the ground. The problem is that the big hole–situated exactly adjacent to our apartment complex–happens to be swarming with all manner of workers literally laying the foundations for what is apparently going to be quite a large building.

Like most construction workers, they tend to do their swarming at hours when the rest of us are enjoying our nightly slumber, and, as you might expect, construction worker swarms are one of the louder of the swarm varieties. Rather than the more standard buzzing noises swarms tend to emit, construction worker swarms are frequently accompanied by clanging noises, drilling noises, and all manner of other noises generally not conducive to sleeping between the hours of 5 and 7 in the morning.

My building, 33, does not front directly to the construction. We’re set back, probably 100 yards or so, and are shielded to a small extent by some of the other buildings in the community (my small community is a forest of pretty good-sized apartment buildings. I wouldn’t say there’s a one of them under 150 feet tall), and even then we still can get a pretty good racket drifting in through the bedroom window.

The residents of building 37 are not as lucky. Their building’s right smack next to the construction site, and it takes the brunt of the noise. They are understandably not excited about this status, especially considering there were zero public hearings prior to when construction began. Apparently the authorities and the companies putting the building up made no effort to communicate anything about what they were planning, or to listen to the concerns of the community right next door. If they had, they probably would have heard things like “Try not to schedule construction before 7 in the morning, especially during the gaokao” (for those unaware of why the gaokao is such a big deal, take a look at the last paragraph of the “Procedure” section of that article), or “plopping down a bundle of 100m high buildings right smack in front of our apartments is going to block out all of our sunlight”.

Unfortunately for the residents of building 37, the developer didn’t make any consultations beforehand. And frankly, why should they? They have no reason to. It’s likely that the land developer has some kind of cozy deal with the city or district government, whether in the form of kickbacks, or contracts dealt to firms owned by family members of government officials. Even barring any of that, even if the developers went strictly by the book, SOP for construction in China doesn’t appear to involve any kind of community consultation, consultation of the sort that would mean things like wasted time during the process, and wasted money in the form of changes made to the final buildings (after all, shorter, less dense clusters of buildings of the sort the residents of building 37 would like mean less rent to go around).

In the face of all this, the residents of building 37 appear to have adopted a “We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it” attitude. Every night for the past few weeks they’ve been out in force on the sidewalk out front of our building with their banner and, when they’ve really gotten their dander up, a dude with a megaphone.

As someone who went to college in Washington DC, I know that this is strictly single-A ball as far as protests go. First, they’re protesting at night when there’s no one around to see them. Second, they’re not making use of what I would consider to be a primo protest location. The sidewalk they’ve taken fronts to an access road leading off of one of the main concentric ring roads surrounding the city, the second innermost one, to be precise . Here’s a map to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Shockingly professional, eh? That’s the kind of quality you should come to expect from this blog. Also, I think I should probably mention that I lifted the map from www.kinabaloo.com. I’m still new to this whole “web ethics” thing, so I’m not sure if just mentioning it there is enough to clear me on the whole “fair use” thing, or if I actually have to get specific permission. If one of my readers (hi Mom!), could enlighten me, I would be eternally grateful, and might perhaps purchase you lamb mutton skewers at some unspecified future date.

Anyway, building 37 looks right out onto the 3rd ring road. And it’s not just anywhere on the 3rd ring road. Right next to our building is one of the city’s main interchanges, a location where literally hundreds of thousands of people will pass each day. If I were the people in building 37, and I really wanted to get my protest on, I would make a banner 3 stories high and 150 feet long and string it across the front of the building. Now that would be a “mass incident”.

Also detracting from the general protest-ish atmosphere of the. . .umm . . . protest, is the general lack of visible outrage on the part of participants. The signs aren’t particularly passive (more on that in a second), but neither do they target anyone in government or in the corporate world. They name no names. The protesters themselves basically just camp out on the sidewalk for a few hours every night, chat among themselves for a few hours, and then go home. There’s really not that much separating them from the clumps of folks playing mahjong or doing taiqi in the parks, except that the’ve got some mildly-aggrieved sounding signs next to them.

Now, to be fair here, there’s probably not much else that they can do. Who are they supposed to take their protest to? They’ve called the television stations, which didn’t come. The newspapers have likewise declined to cover the story. Supposing they did manage to get a foreign media correspondent on the scene (which they won’t, mainly because this kind of stuff happens every day in China), it likely wouldn’t have any effect, because, to put it mildly, the New York Times doesn’t have the same kind of pull in Beijing that it does in the Bronx. The local government is likely in the back pocket of the developers. If I understood them right (which I probably didn’t) when I was chatting with them, they’re not allowed to protest during the day, because it would clog up an important transportation artery. And as for putting the sign on the building, I doubt any of them are very keen to take a ride downtown, so to speak. So they do what they can.

And I say more power to them. I doubt my posting about this here is going to do anything to aid their cause, but who knows. Maybe one of my readers (hi Mom!), knows someone who knows someone who happens to be a Beijing city bureaucrat. Stranger things have happened.

This is a close up picture of some of the signs. Credit goes to my gf on the photo, who managed to get a much clearer night shot than anything I could manage. Loosely translated, the slogans come out as “Give me back my sunshine”, “Oppose illegal construction”, and “Think about everything based on citizens”.

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