The most visible and expressive form of political participation is the involvement and activity of protests, boycotting, and petitioning. The public will easily become violent when they believe that their actions are justified and that their end goals will be achieved by those specific methods. In the year 2011 alone, more than thirty protests have transpired in a multitudinous amount of countries. Each riot/protest has varied in motive, extent, destruction, and their level of success towards their end goal.
People protest for a plethora of differing reasons. Some choose direct action because they believe that the achievement in getting media attention will be the most straightforward and beneficial path. Others feel the need to use such methods because of their lack in structure and ability that, as a result, makes them feel unable to access legitimate political channels. Ted Robert Gurr discussed that “feelings of relative deprivation motivate people to act aggressively. These feelings can stimulate frustration, discontent, and anger- which may then lead to violence.” And even another, that the reason behind the act is simply because the government and its people are no longer one coordinating system that appears to the public as legitimate.
The Anshun Incident is on the far side of the spectrum in unorganized and spontaneous protest. It was gathered by what we can define as an anomic group; a spontaneous group of working class individuals that react to an event that stimulates frustration, disappointment, or other strong emotions. On a Tuesday afternoon, in Southwest China's Guizhou province, a handicapped street hawker was beaten-to-death by urban management officers at 1:43pm. The reaction was almost instantaneous when thousands of local residents swarmed to the area in protest. A government vehicle was turned over and destroyed in the middle of the road. The protestors furiously threw stones at the police officers, as the officers tried to disperse the angry crown with water canons. The protest continued on, all the while the vendor’s cadaver still lay disposed on the roadside.
When trying to research this event, only three articles were available to view that dwelled deeply into the incident. The first being a small two-sentence summary on Wikipedia, which as we all know, is an extremely reliable source. The second was a Chinese news article, which covered the main facts but didn’t go much further than the base points.
And, the third was the most insightful, with details about not only the incident, but the autopsy, the tactics used by the police towards the rioters, and the article even went further to discuss China’s “stability obsessed rulers.”
Besides these three, any news article based on this story was nearly impossible to find. This makes me question what the purpose of the rioters was. Only one known video was taken from the incident. And, taking into consideration the lack of news coverage of this incident, I can assume that media coverage was not the protestor’s first priority. The protestors exclaimed, “the murderer must be punished.” This makes me wonder, can thousands of average civilians band together just because they feel there has been an injustice? Not because an injustice has been done towards them personally, because of a law they want to abolish, or a policy they want to create or change, but just because they want to see their officials, the men meant to serve the people, act with a little humanity?
