The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

government statistics that indicate over 10,000 mass
incidents in 1995, 60,000 in 2005, and 80,000 in 2007. 50
With mounting unemployment at least part of which
can be associated with the global economic crisis, Chinese
experts expected that rising unemployment and
increased social tension in both rural and urban areas
would lead to an increase in mass incidents in 2009. 51
Most mass incidents are resolved peacefully or
relatively peacefully by local officials and local public
security forces. 52 Some, however, develop into largescale
violent clashes between masses of citizens and
the authorities. When these clashes, which can involve
hundreds, thousands, or even upward of 10,000 people,
get out of control, local government is forced to
turn to the PAP to restore order. Thus the PAP has
a strong interest in analyzing the causes of mass incidents
and developing strategies, procedures, and
equipment to handle such events. 53
Some authors link social instability to “foreign enemy
forces” trying to “Westernize China.” 54 But for
the most part, Chinese analysts attribute mass incidents
to domestic causes: unemployment, the precarious
economic and living situations of rural migrants
in China’s cities, social tensions associated with the
increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, and, particularly,
dissatisfaction with and alienation from local
government, which often seems to be in cahoots
with wealth and power and callousness toward the
needs and feelings of local people. 55 Both members of
the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee
and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS)
sociologists have suggested that mass incidents tend
to occur in places where there are no open channels
of communication between local people and their
government and Party leaders, and where the local
252