BEIJING (AP) December,2- – Chinese Communist Party leaders don’t skimp when it comes to ensuring regime security.
The scale of this extravagant spending has been fueled by anger over draconian and seemingly endless restrictions to combat COVID-19, sparking the most daring street protests in decades in Beijing and other cities. It became clear.
For decades, governments have prepared for such challenges by putting in place the machinery necessary to quell mass unrest.
After an initially muted response by security guards using pepper spray and tear gas, police and paramilitary forces flooded the city streets with jeeps, vans and armoured vehicles in a massive show of force.
Officers agitated checked IDs, and searched mobile phones for photos, messages, or banned apps that could indicate involvement or sympathy for the protests. It’s unclear how many people were arrested and whether charges will be filed. Most protesters focused their anger on a “zero COVID” policy aimed at eradicating the virus through drastic lockdowns, travel restrictions and relentless testing. There have also been calls for Xi Jinping to resign, with the party saying the speech was destructive and punishable by years in prison.
After the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the party invested in measures to deal with the riots and did not resort to immediate lethal force.
Amid a wave of opposition from the unemployed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, authorities tested this approach, preventing various city organizers from banding together to arrest their leaders and the general public. Civil protesters focused on leaving it mostly untouched. When anti-government riots erupted in Tibet’s capital Lhasa in 2008 and riots swept through the Tibetan region of western China, the government responded with overwhelming force. The authorities responded with overwhelming force.
The following year, a police crackdown on protests by ethnic Uyghur Muslim minorities in Urumqi, the capital of northwestern Xinjiang, resulted in bloody clashes that left at least 197 people dead, most of them Han civilians.
In both cases, officers fired into the crowd, searched houses, and arrested an unknown number of suspects. Millions of people were held in camps, monitored and banned from travelling.
China has been able to mobilize such resources thanks to its enormous domestic security budget, which has reportedly tripled her size over the past decade and exceeded its defence budget. In Xinjiang alone, domestic security spending increased tenfold in the early 2000s, according to Western estimates.
In 2010, the homeland security budget exceeded the defence budget for the first time. China has not provided its breakdown since 2013. The Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, estimates that homeland security spending reached 113% of his defence spending by 2016. The annual growth rate was about twice that of the national defence, and both grew much faster than the economy. Less obtrusive but equally intimidating systems for monitoring online content for anti-government messages, unauthorized messages, and images are prevalent. Government censors work hard to erase such elements, and propaganda teams flood the web with propaganda messages.
Behind the crackdown lies a legal system geared toward a one-party dictatorship. China is not a law-abiding country, but a law-abiding country. The law is flexible, and anyone targeted by authorities can go to jail on a variety of vague charges. It’s unclear how sustainable it will be, he said. “This could result in shifting China’s priorities or increasing tensions between the two countries.”
