Despite the Hu-Wen team’s reassurances about doing more for society’s underclasses, there are growing signs of disaffection among disadvantaged sectors.

As for suicides, official statistics showed that some 287,000 people took their own lives in 2003, with 2 million unsuccessful attempts. This means that every two minutes, one Chinese kills himself or herself while there are eight unsuccessful suicide attempts. While the per capita suicide rate in China is not the highest in the world, it is symptomatic of an uncaring government — and shockingly unequal distribution of income and resources.

According to experts at the Beijing Psychological Crisis Research Center, more than 80 percent of the country’s suicides are farmers, particularly female ones.167 As the cases of self-immolation committed by victims of “urban clearance” have shown, many have tried to end their lives as an act of protest against gross unfairness in society.

Other Chinese who feel cheated by the system, however, are not so docile. Until the late 1990s, a disgruntled, newly laid-off factory worker might choose to vent his frustration by murdering his boss. Now, aggrieved citizens might air their grievances by committing “individual acts of terrorism” such as letting off explosives in a crowded place in a big city. In the summer and autumn of 2003, numerous cases of severe urban violence were reported. Real or fake bombs and other explosives were discovered in airports, supermarkets, department stores, and fast-food chains in cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Guanghou, Nanjing, and Wuhan. Moreover, partly as a result of market reforms, it has become much easier for would-be urban terrorists to purchase and manufacture lethal weapons. For example, a bomb costs less than 30 yuan to make. Beijing’s worst nightmare is that the terminally frustrated and disaffected could band together and form guerrilla-style urban terrorist groups.

Also on the rise is the use of rat poison as a vehicle of “urban terrorism.” Ten yuan’s worth of Dushu Qiang, a cheap but potent rat poison, could kill hundreds of people. In September 2003, more than 400 pupils and teachers in a school in Yueyang, Hunan Province — and another 75 in a Guizhou Province school — were hospitalized after eating meals laced with Dushu Qiang. A year earlier in Nanjing, 42 people, mostly college kids, were killed with the same weapon. While government officials have not released casualty figures from rat poison, the China News Service reported that in a three-month period ending January 2003, police had investigated 585 cases of criminal rat poisoning.

According to a late 2003 report in the official ChinaNewsweek, “individual terrorist crimes” have posed a big threat to Chinese society. Means used by these quasi-terrorist felons — many of whom are members of disadvantaged and marginalized sectors of society such as the chronically unemployed — have included explosives, poison, arson, hijacking, and assassination.

ChinaNewsweek quoted noted Beijing-based scholar Hu Lianhe as saying that “social contradictions have been magnified because [traditional] social adjustment mechanisms and safety valves have lost their function.” Hu cited the problematic judicial and court system, poor mediation efforts by official departments, and the inefficacy of the system of government units handling petitions from the downtrodden.

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