Will the boat sink the water?

I don’t have the temperament to do a PhD but if there is a me in a parallel universe who is patient, meticulous and detailed she’ll be doing a dissertation on protest and political unrest in rural China.  So even in this universe I’m interested that a protest in a village in Guangdong province is now making international headlines.

Wukan villagers claim that the local government confiscated land for development. This is in one of the wealthiest provinces in the whole of China so the gains from development are enormous. This is not an isolated incident. Skimming off the gains from the sale of land is one of many temptations to poorly paid local government officials and one of the main aggravations to farmers.


There are few options for people to call their local officials to account. They can’t vote out their councillors at the next election, after all. Indeed democratic elections at a very local level are being talked about within or around the Communist Party precisely as a way to exert some anti-corruption control. In the meantime, protest is tolerated and perhaps even in some ways encouraged by the senior, national levels of the Party as an alternative method of people exerting control. It has dangers when the protest grows out of the Party’s grasp and in Wukan it has got seriously out of hand: a protester has died in police custody and the village is blockaded by the authorities. Look for the village on search engines inside China and you will find blockades there too.

And what does this have to do with MBA Insights? Possibly not enough, you may conclude but I don’t write another blog and I do think there is a link to all of us. China has achieved amazing things in the economic transformation since Mao’s death. Nevertheless there are serious problems in this society. Corruption and related protest are widespread. Nationalism could act as a flashpoint for protest. Social and economic inequality is severe. The housing boom might be a bubble. President Hu has repeated again this year that economic growth is fundamental to China’s stability: growth is falling back to about 6%.

Reuters is quoting a Chinese University study claiming that there were over 90,000 “mass incidents” of protest (rural and urban) in 2006 which is a lot even in a country the size of China. I tentatively suggest that these stresses and fractures should be of concern to us all and that anything which brought several of them together could be very serious indeed. I confess I have no idea what we do about it.

Finally, how does this relate to my title? I have stolen the title from the English translation of a book by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao which documents corruption and rural protest in Anhui, a much poorer part of the country. It reverses a Tang dynasty saying that the water can sink the boat, seeing the peasants as water needed (but not always willing) to hold up the boat of the state. One of the people Chen and Wu interviewed suggested that perhaps now the actions of the state may be sinking the peasants.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.