Last Wednesday Qin Chen, my roomie, came home complaining of a bad day at work. I asked her what happened and she said that some kind of strike with workers at a busy port of entry in Shanghai prevented one of her company's shipping containers to make it through, thus delaying orders to other international clients. She and other employees at the company had followed what was going on at the harbor using news updates and micro-blogs until all of the sites suddenly were blocked on the Chinese internet. She came home curious as to what was happening so she used my uncensored internet to check it out.
The headlines didn't make it to my inbox until today, Sunday, when I saw the article "Chinese Truck Drivers Block Port Over Gas Prices." Turns out the drivers are angry at the rising cost of fuel in China as well as the extra fees warehouses have started to charge them during their shipping routes. Because of all of these added costs they aren't able to make enough money to afford the expenses in their own lives.
There's a lot of chatter about inflation and rising prices of goods here in China. I don't hear about if from my students at the university, but for the adults and young professionals at my second job it's a hot topic. Everyone is complaining about how things are becoming really expensive while salaries and wages aren't being increased. Another issue is the housing bubble; prices of houses and apartments are outlandishly expensive and people are speculating if and when this bubble will "pop." One of my students this week actually works as a censor for the Changzhou forums. Her job is to remove anything inappropriate about the Party or the government from the websites open to chatting and networking specifically related to our city. She says the number of complaints that she has to remove are rising every day.
While everybody is up in arms about rising costs my older students don't seem particularly concerned with anything related to politics or human rights. Take the recent example of man named Ai Weiwei. Ken (previous teacher here) mentioned this story to me the other day and since then I keep seeing his name pop up in news articles. Ai Weiwei is well-known because he was one of the architects behind the building known as the "Bird's Nest." In China, he uncovered some government corruption related to inferior school buildings which led to the death of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The Chinese government recently arrested Ai Weiwei and is not saying where he is or what's going on.
But it's not people like Ai Weiwei that the Chinese government really has to worry about right now - it's keeping the 1.3 billion or so Chinese people happy and unable to network about their complaints. If more and more Chinese turn to the un-blocked blogs and social-networking sites to vent about rising prices or unsustainable living conditions, protests like the latest truck drivers strike will become more and more common and the PRC is going to have to deal with a huge number of unhappy citizens with the ability and the potential to organize - kind of a frightening thought, to say the least.
As for my roommate, she just hopes that the strikes blow over soon so that her shipping container can get through and she can stop having angry phone conversations with business owners from the U.S. and U.K. who just want their golf trolleys delivered on time.
Or they could just let the yuan rise, and boom, everyone in China is way richer and imports (read: gasoline) are much cheaper!!! What a great short term solution!