This paper analyzes recent protests and uprisings in China and explores their connection to human rights abuses. It discusses how the Chinese government has a long history of corruption and human rights violations. Many of the protests are a result of issues with land expropriation by local governments, including forced relocation, low compensation, and embezzlement of funds. Other causes of unrest include censorship, lack of political freedom, and ethnic/religious tensions in places like Tibet and Xinjiang. The government often responds to protests with violence and arrests. Overall, the paper examines how lack of political rights and human rights abuses have fueled growing dissent across China in recent years.

1. Gabriel Passmore
POLS 454
Term Paper
November 14, 2012
Protests, Uprisings, and Human Rights in Modern Day China
In recent years China has experienced a series of uprisings, revolts, and protests in
different provinces throughout the country. Why are these protests occurring and are they
connected to the Chinese Communist Governments abuse of human rights? These events
are significant to the question because China has had a long history of governmental
corruption and years of human rights abuses that has sparked international attention. The
main themes that will be presented in this paper include the types of political issues that
activated these protests. The prospect that the causes behind these protests are related or
connected to the government in some way will be highlighted in the main section of the
paper. The issue over human rights abuses will be discussed as well as the relevance of
the lack of freedom in China that can be a contributing motivator to ignite an upheaval
when peace is absent.
Human rights abuses has plagued China’s republic for decades because China is still
an un-democratic country whose government displays an arsenal of abuses towards its
citizens for the sole reason of staying in power. The Chinese Communist Government
still to this day implores a series of measures that are designed to control and remind the
masses of who’s in charge. The concept of power is an obvious indictor of why the
Chinese Communist Party controls the population in the form of subjects for the
continuation of the regime. Human rights abuses are handed down as a concept of fear.
Fear, that if the Chinese government opens up to full democracy then they will surely fall

2. from power. The Chinese people face a fear in the form of abuses that will scare the
population and keep them in line, never to face down the government and its visible
corruption because of the consequences if an individual steps out of line.
In the awake of these protests and uprisings the Chinese people have cared less about
fear and more about standing up for their rights. As a consequence, the Chinese
government acts ever so swiftly in order to stop these incidents from accelerating into
something catastrophic that the government might not be able to control. In the after math
of the chaos many Chinese citizens have been injured in the form beatings, detained by
the police, or died as a result. On May 13, 1999, tensions between villagers and
government officials had escalated to the point that water hoses had to be used to disperse
the crowd. Seventeen people had been arrested and seven were charged with criminal
activity. Thousands of protesters clashed with the police in China’s southwestern Yunnan
province, blocking major traffic routes and wrecking an ambulance because the
paramedics were taking care of injured police officers and ignoring protesters who were
also injured. The police have shot and killed two people, arrested twenty while seriously
injuring a third person in a protest outside a rubber plant in the Yunnan province.
Hundreds of villagers armed with shovels and sticks clashed with police and construction
workers in the city of Zhaotong in the northeast Yunnan province. Fifty vehicles were
destroyed and twenty people were injured when a villager was punched and kicked by
security guards for taking pictures.
In the past, protests were mostly seen in rural areas and small towns, led by villagers,
farmers, and migrant workers. However, as of 2011 many of these uprisings were
reported in major cities. The protests in Wukan were demonstrated as a farmer set off

3. three bombs that killed two people including himself while injuring ten others. On June
10, 2011 a Chinese citizen claimed that he was going to take revenge on society by
setting off explosives outside of local government offices. As a result, two people were
injured in the attack. Social groups are on the rise in China and they employ a certain
event to express their anger towards the government. One event of this nature was the
July 23, 2011 high-speed train collision that killed forty people and injured one hundred
ninety two in the after math. Social protests have also been on the rise in China as was
the case with the rise of the Arab revolutions were overseas websites supported the effort,
which led to a crackdown on civil society by the government were numerous writers,
bloggers, and human rights lawyers were arrested. One of the highest profile cases of
social protest was the April 3, 2011 arrest of famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. However,
Ai was released after the domestic and international media pressured the Chinese
authorities. Today, Ai is kept under house arrest by the Chinese government.
Work place protests are common throughout China, especially in August and
September of 2004 in the Dazhou province where over one hundred workers of the
Tongda Chemical Company “blocked the main gate of the living quarters of the factory
staff and attempted to stop them from going to work”(Zhang). On June 28, 2008 in the
Weng’an province, a local government invoked 30,000 violent protesters that descended
onto the station torching three government buildings and burning cars. The police
responded by using tear gas to break up the crowd. Local police were hit with stones and
sticks in the Shishou province in the attempt to protect a dead body from becoming
cremated. Ethnic religious tensions reached a peak in the Xinjiang province with a
Uighur uprising, which claimed the lives of one hundred and eighty four people. Social

4. justice issues triggered protests in the northeastern city of Tonghua, which resulted in a
manager being beaten to death when he threatened the protesters. The violence in Lhasa
has been ongoing for many years in the awake of human rights abuses from the Chinese
government, were individuals are mercilessly tortured with different kinds of materials.
People are regarded as animals that are suspended in the air while their limbs are
shackled, ice is rubbed on their skin and then they are touched with an electric prod.
There are also protests of how women are treated in Lhasa in which they are forced to
have mandatory sterilizations.
The protests and uprisings that have occurred in China over the recent years have not
happened because of coincidence or random deception, but rather for a reason to express
animosity towards the Chinese government’s authoritarian rule. The Yunnan protests
were a result of enforced land expropriation through coercive measures by the township
government. The government officials would enter the village and force householders
into accepting compensation payments for their land. Then they would move in with their
utility vehicles and bulldozers, destroying crops and often conspiring to take more land
then they were permitted. The land contracts often contained escalating tuition fees and
high taxes such as the education surcharge, which affected the householder’s financial
stability. Many villagers were angry that the compensation they were supposed to be
renewed for was often postponed for reasons unknown. The government officials
contradicted the central policies that were intended to protect the villager’s interests. For
example, the expropriated land would be used to build a school, but instead the land
would be used to benefit the officials by building private residences and business
premises.

5. More riots have ensued in the Yunnan province because of compensation issues. The
residents are being forced to resettle for the construction of a dam. The disputes over
payment continue to remain unresolved and the residents are dissatisfied with the quality
of the resettlement houses because there are located on an earthquake zone. The unrest
that occurred at a rubber plant in the Yunnan province that resulted in two people being
killed by the police was caused over a dispute involving the sale of the crops. The rubber
farmers protested against the local government because they were forcing the farmers to
sell their crops at prices that were forty percent lower than what they obtain in the open
market. These land protests are occurring almost every month in China because of the
local government’s violation of central government regulations on compensation and the
provision of temporary housing for residents. The local government officials usually go
ahead with the land acquisitions without the consent of the villagers on projects that don’t
acquire the amount of land taken, which is then embezzled from the proceeds of the sale.
Two of the incidents in the Wukan province that claimed the life of two people and
injured many were the result of yet another case of low compensation for the
expropriation of land that government took from farmers. Many of the social protests in
the Wukan province that claimed life and injury were caused by the citizen’s anger at the
Chinese government’s tightened political control of media censorship and freedom of
expression. More than two hundred million Chinese citizens are using weibo, which is the
Chinese equivalent of Twitter. They use this social networking system to discuss politics,
ask questions, and talk about issues within society that makes them angry. This has
challenged China’s political and propaganda establishment as citizens now have the
opportunity to indirectly criticize the government and pre plan events that can under mine

6. the system. The protests in the Dazhou province between workers and factory staff was
caused by the workers suspecting that the Dazhou local government breached procedures
and were involved in illegal activities that interfered with the operation of enterprise
structuring. The local government had secretly worked out a restructuring plan for the
workers without their representation and made them sign documents saying they would
agree to it.
Protests in the Weng’an province were caused when a young woman’s body was
found in the river. When relatives of the deceased woman went to the police station to
inquire about an investigation they were beaten for no reason and told it was a suicide.
The local government’s poor ability to handle possible criminal incidents, but quick
response to crush protests has caused for the case to be reopened for investigation. The
police officer who assaulted the family was fired, but the case was still ruled a suicide.
Distrust in governmental politicians, corruption, and social turmoil are some of the
leading causes of a series of incidents that occurred in the Shishou province that received
much attention nationwide through the Internet in 2009. The protests erupted when “a
young waiter died after falling from a third floor widow of a hotel reportedly owned by a
local politician who was involved in drug smuggling”(Wu). The police proclaim that the
waiter’s death was the result of a suicide. The local residents denied the police’s
conclusion and instead believed that “the young man had been killed by the hotel
manager to cover up crime and corruption”(Wu). The local police rushed to try and have
the body cremated so the residents would never know the truth about what really
happened. The Uighur riots that occurred in the Xinjiang province were the result of
building ethnic tensions by the government dominated Han Chinese who are intolerant to

7. minority groups such as the Uighurs. The incident that claimed the life of a manager at
the Tonghua Steel Company was caused by the transition to a market based economy as
the workers became angry and protested because they lost their benefits when the
formerly state owned Steel Company became privatized.
The continued unrest in Lhasa can be contributed to the routine abuse of human rights
by the Chinese government. Lhasa, which is located in Tibet, has always considered itself
independent form the rest of China. Tibetans view themselves as culturally distant form
China through language and religion. Protests are common in Lhasa because of the
Chinese governments driving force to eradicate the Tibetan people from the region,
which includes the use of culture genocide. Culture genocide involves political
imprisonment and the routine use of torture on Tibetan civilians for “the illegitimacy of
China’s sovereignty in the region”(Adams). China is intolerant towards Tibet because of
the ethnic divide between the two groups. The Chinese government is systematically
trying to eliminate all traces of Tibetan culture by suppressing language and religion.
Another form of abuse that causes protests in Lhasa is the treatment of women in the
region. Women are subjected to mandatory sterilizations and forced abortions. This is the
Chinese governments way of reducing the Tibetan population. Tibetans are angry that the
Chinese government would resort to these measures of abuse in hopes of purifying the
Han majority.
When exploring the causes for the recent protests and uprisings in China, the
reoccurring theme is the government’s expropriation of land from the peasant majority.
The peasants are supposed to be compensated by the government for the confiscation of
their land. Land contracts are usually shady deals in which the peasants compensation is

8. postponed and the reimbursement of land is sometimes located in disaster areas. The
local Chinese government is to blame for a great deal of the protests that occur on a
monthly basis. Whether its unapproved land grabs, corruption, or criminal cover-ups, the
local government is involved in some way. Even though the local government officials
receive their authority and regulations from the central government, never is it reveled
that the central authorities hold the local officials accountable for breaking the law.
Two other factors that revolve around the causes for protests and uprisings in modern
day China are social turmoil and human rights abuses. The Chinese government controls
all aspects of the media and the freedom of speech. No one is allowed to voice his or her
opinion or criticize the government in any way. For years the central authorities have told
the average Chinese citizen what to do, what they can and cannot say, and how to think.
It is to no surprise that the Chinese people protest and rise up when their inalienable
rights such as freedom is suppressed in the from of government crackdowns. Human
rights abuses in the form of cultural genocide conclude why the Tibetan people protest to
stabilize their threatened minority from extinction by the Chinese government.

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