The New York Times-20080127-Plan to Extend Shanghai Rail Line Stirs Middle Class to Protest
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Plan to Extend Shanghai Rail Line Stirs Middle Class to Protest
Full Text (1131 words)Yang Yang, a 29-year-old saleswoman, had never imagined herself in the role of advocate.
But when she learned from her housing development's electronic bulletin board of the city's plans to extend Shanghai's futuristic magnetic levitation, or maglev, train line within 30 yards of her house, she was angered about the effect on property values and began networking with other middle-class opponents both in her neighborhood and all along the planned train route.
Word of the antitrain sentiment quickly gathered momentum, and on Jan. 12, a sunny Saturday afternoon, Ms. Yang found herself in Shanghai's most important public square with a few thousand other similarly disgruntled residents, many of them carrying signs and chanting slogans denouncing the train project, in one of the largest demonstrations this city has seen in recent years.
The citizens like Ms. Yang who marched on People's Square are wary of calling their event and the antitrain movement a protest. Most even shy from the word march, preferring to speak instead of a collective walk to the square. But the coalescing of homeowners here around issues like property values, environmental safety, urban planning and how tax money is spent is seen as the strongest sign yet of rising resentment among China's fast-growing middle class over a lack of say in decision making.
Ms. Yang said: The money is from us, the taxpayers. Shanghai may be relatively rich, and it enjoys fast growth, but this is no justification for them spending the money collected from us on a pure prestige project.
Many of the early opponents of the route extension seized upon objections cited in a protest last year that forced a retracing of the line in which people voiced fears about radiation from the train's powerful electromagnets, but grievances have multiplied.
Beyond the voicing of deep-seated skepticism about the government's priorities and about what many feel is the waste of taxpayers' money, what most distinguishes this wave of demonstrations from other recent protests is a new insistence that the government seek the public's consent in decisions that directly affect their lives.
You could say this is a sign of a rising middle class and the awakening of a sense of real citizenship, said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics at Beijing Institute of Technology.
With its tradition of top-down decision making, secretive deliberations and little tolerance for dissent, the Chinese government has almost no practice of real popular consultation.
Recently, though, under President Hu Jintao's policy of harmonious development, the state has made tentative efforts to solicit public opinion, but opponents of the maglev train and other critics say the Shanghai crisis has shown the government's initiatives to be far too timid.
Why are they so late to reveal their plans and why so secretly? said Zhang Junying, 71, who lives along the projected train route.
He was referring to the government's mention of the new route on an obscure environmental Web site in January, with an invitation for responses by letter or e-mail within two weeks. To many, the announcement seemed intended to attract as little attention as possible.
That discreet approach quickly backfired as word spread among residents that the government had only given them a two week window to stop the project. City offices were besieged by phone calls as well as by letter and e-mail writers. When the government did not respond, a protest movement was born.
Those who set out to change the government's course through protests took encouragement from a smaller homeowner-led demonstration against the maglev train last year that resulted in a change of route, and an even more recent people's victory, as it was called in the press, in the southern city of Xiamen, where civic mobilization forced the suspension of plans to build a large chemical plant in an urban area.
Xiamen officials have portrayed the suspension of the project as an example of the new, harmonious approach to government promoted by Beijing. But some observers say the Xiamen example, which is often cited by demonstrators here, complicates things for Shanghai's leaders, and potentially for Beijing itself.
On the one hand, the outbreak of unrest, or even prolonged opposition in a city that functions as China's international showcase would be unwelcome.
But if a citizens' movement here did manage to force the government to reverse its plans, disgruntled citizens in cities all over China could take their cue from Shanghai.
The Xiamen incident has served as a demonstration, and as people from other places learn from Xiamen, and new methods are put into place as they learn, then a snowball starts rolling and getting bigger and bigger, said Liu Junning, a researcher at the Institute of Chinese Culture, who studies public opinion and popular movements.
A well-known dissident author, Wang Lixiong, spoke far more cautiously. The precedence of Xiamen could have the opposite effect for Shanghai, he said. The authorities might think they cannot encourage a pattern where compromise follows collective walking.
Shanghai's leaders seem mindful both of the stakes and of their limited room to maneuver. A recent editorial that was widely attributed to the city's newly appointed Communist Party boss, Yu Zhengsheng, suggested the city would postpone any decisions on the train until tempers had cooled.
Behind the scenes, the government is working hard to break the back of the movement, sending scores of police officers to neighborhoods where meetings have been held, briefly arresting people who appear at gatherings to oppose the maglev, forcing them to erase digital photos they have taken of protests and to sign confessions. Demonstrators say they have been warned that if they are arrested a second time, they will be detained for 15 days. Others have been told by their employers that they will be fired if they participate in protests. News media coverage of the controversy has been banned.
The protesters seem to have anticipated many of the government's responses, however, and the loose movement has configured itself in ways that make it difficult to suppress, using electronic bulletin boards and YouTube to post news of protests and keeping the protests publicly leaderless, to avoid having key people arrested.
Zhao Fang, 35, a housewife, suggested that the authorities were underestimating opposition to the project. She had no job to lose, she said, and would not be intimidated by the arrests. They think we'll only be strong and angry for a while and then we'll cool down and become confused.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Xiao Weiping, right, a homemaker, reporting to neighbors on plans for a high-speed magnetic-levitation rail line near their homes in Shanghai. It would follow the Ding Pu River, left.; The new maglev line is planned on the right side of the Ding Pu River, prompting protest from residents on both shores. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN PYLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)