Tiananmen has a classic ironic twist to it that is hard to miss: it is incongruous that the symbol of historical protests is called “the gate of heavenly peace.” This paradox will be on China’s mind as it braces for the 20th anniversary of the crackdown. But then you don’t need to talk about ironies to China; its growth story has been full of contradictions. An economy that for three decades has been scaling dizzying heights. A society that is seeing a rising graph of unrest in the form of protests, riots and strikes. There have been rising calls that public expressions of resistance should be resolved in “a harmonious and an orderly way.” But if China wants to manage “harmonious protests”, can it also figure out the contradictions inherent in such an oxymoron? 

Beijing may well find that people are not in much of a mood to forgive any semantic stumbles. China today is riding the tiger of complex social transition, as the economic slowdown begins to hurt. As its economy looks set to miss the psychological benchmark of 8 per cent growth, 48 million job-seekers might be joining the ranks of the unemployed. A recent sampling survey carried out by the Agriculture Ministry revealed that the number of jobless migrant workers has already surged to 20 million. Add to this nearly 3 million of the educated unemployed, about 40 percent of China’s 7.8 million graduates. Many of these faultlines run along social, economic and gender dimensions, with distinct spatial patterns. Regional variations in performance indicators of health, education, housing, and infrastructure are massive across China, owing to vast differentials in local revenue bases. Out-of-pocket medical expenses borne by individuals have now risen steeply from 16 per cent in 1980s to hover around 60 per cent. Female literacy has been the direct casualty of the rising education burden on families — an estimated 80 per cent of China’s new illiterates are girls. The fact that of the 2 million children who drop out of school each year, 1.4 million turn out to be girls conveys a troubling story of social exclusion. Across China, the ‘Glass Curtain’ between the rural and the urban, the coasts and inland, the wealthy and the vulnerable is developing into a knowledge and skills divide. As it juggles prosperity and protest, the real question that China needs to debate is this: is the social red alert likely to become a political red alert?  

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