President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, two veteran bureaucrats with well-honed fire-fighting abilities, are not taking any chances.

Senior officials have admitted that maintaining socio-political stability requires that 30 million new jobs be generated this year, a tall order given the unlikelihood of a sudden upsurge in U.S. and European demand for Chinese products. Even worse is the fact that China’s perennially intimidated intellectuals seem to be losing patience and are becoming more daring in challenging the regime.

A laborer in Xiangfan, on Dec. 18. Top China officials admit that maintaining socio-political stability requires 30 million new jobs this year, a tall order given the global drop in demand for Chinese products. Reuters/Stringer

First came the Charter 08 Movement early last month, when 300 leading writers, academics and retired liberal cadres started a signature campaign asking the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership to grant Chinese freedom of expression, religion and assembly and to introduce free elections and the rule of law.

Nearly 8,000 citizens in various provinces risked arrest and police intimidation and signed the petition. Yet another group of intellectuals have started an Internet appeal to Beijing to halt plans for a large-scale military parade on Oct. 1 to celebrate 60 years of CCP rule. The petitioners say that at this time of economic downturn, this show of force will be a “waste of public finances.”

Just last week, 22 scholars and writers circulated an Internet-based “boycott CCTV” campaign. CCTV, the party’s mouthpiece, is criticized for broadcasting a program last autumn that praised high hygienic standards of the Sanlu Group, whose melamine-tainted milk products were subsequently found to have sickened tens of thousands of babies nationwide.

According to internal documents prepared by units including the police, the Ministry of State Security and the party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, Beijing expects more trouble-making by “anti-China forces both at home and abroad” as time draws closer to the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre.

At a year-end meeting, the Hu-led Politburo decided to raise security measures to levels comparable to those imposed in the run-up to and during the Beijing Summer Olympics. All party and government departments, in addition to state-held enterprises, have set up internal “steering groups” on how to safeguard social stability by combating “dangerous and destabilizing elements” such as dissidents, petitioners, ethnic separatists, as well as people with entrenched grievances against the authorities.

The Hu-Wen leadership has already indicated that if serious “mass incidents” such as riots and disturbances were to break out in a county or city, responsible local party and government leaders would be demoted or sacked.

Fallout from this exacerbation of China’s already very tight control mechanism includes a policy change at the Ministry of Public Security, which has stopped giving permission for meetings and most other activities requested by NGOs.

Earlier this month, five members of an ad hoc group representing parents whose children had been fed melamine-tainted milk were detained by police. Public security officials also forbade the Chinese People’s League for the Protection of the Diaoyu Islands — a “patriotic” NGO that challenges Tokyo’s claim of sovereignty over the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands — to hold a conference of activists from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

NGOs, whose members include activist lawyers seeking justice for such “disadvantaged sectors” as peasants whose land has been grabbed by corrupt officials and greedy developers, have been warned not to “stir up trouble” in the coming months.

Some analysts believe that such heavy-handed actions by law enforcement authorities might be counter productive. Now that practically all channels for peaceful expression of opinion by Chinese citizens have been closed, the possibility of disgruntled elements resorting to violence to vent their grievances may become even higher.

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