A couple of weeks ago at a drinks party for foreign journalists in Beijing, the buzz was that the big China story of 2009 was going to be social unrest. The economy tanks, migrant works lose their jobs and, after a few weeks kicking around back on the farm, decide it's time to trash the town hall--you get the picture. It sounded like it was going to be a very uncomfortable year for the press pack as they scour the country for riots, staying in three star hotels or worse. A far cry from covering the Olympics, which at worst meant being sent out to stuff an air monitoring device up the tailpipe of a truck.
To the rescue comes Wang Erping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) who has developed, he says, a scientific method for predicting outbreaks of social unrest. Now reporters love a nutty professor, so in two shakes of an ox's tail a meeting was arranged at Bloomberg's HQ to teach hacks how to intelligently target their scarce and, in these hard times, dwindling resources.
The CAS website says Professor Wang's model can predict unrest in a city or county with 50 to 90 percent accuracy, and that it is receiving attention from senior Chinese officials. I bet it is. With China facing tens of thousands of "mass incidents" a year, Professor Wang no doubt has a busy schedule in government offices around the country.
The model, says Wang, uses surveys of social attitudes, including satisfaction with local policies and leaderships, and subjects them to something called "stepwise regression and discrimination analysis." Rich Stone, a science writer based in Beijing, says the team's predictions for 35 Chinese counties were right in 33 cases. But here's the rub; Stone says that while the model can determine with a fair degree of certainty whether a town will at some point experience unrest, it makes no claim to be able to predict the timing of outbreaks. So it's back to scouring the country.
On a related point, some Chinese social scientists have recently taken to dividing protests into good (middle class, well-organized, clear goals, peaceful) and bad (working class/peasant, spontaneous, unfocussed, angry and often violent). The former (I suspect they think) will, over time, transform China into a peaceful land of country clubs, golf courses and motoring organizations, while the latter has unfortunate connotations of what commentators round here like to call "chaos".
Looking beyond the current global crisis--if there is a beyond, that is--there is a fatal flaw in Professor Wang's reasoning. Social unrest tends to follow on from economic crises--and since nobody, least of all economists, has any idea about how to predict when what we laughingly call the international financial system will trash our jobs and tip us out on the street --it follows that his predictions are as useless as the next man's. Nice try though, and I'm sure he will be able to dine out on his very timely idea for the rest of this year at least.
(China.org.cn by John Sexton February 11, 2009)