One would think that the Dantewada massacre would be big news in Chairman Mao's country. Many in India have expressed anger that China is helping the Maoists with arms, and that the latter follow an ideology that gave rise to a dictatorship which kept China "backward" for years. But the attack was covered here in just one report on the front-page of the official China Daily, with lots of pictures. Interestingly, nowhere was the word, "Maoist", mentioned. The Maoists were referred to as "Naxal rebels" or "left-wing rebels", with an explanation of the word "Naxal". The word, Maoist, was edited out of P. Chidambaram's quote.
Was it to dissociate the ideology from the movement? Funnily enough, the captions to the photographs accompanying the report used the M-word freely! They had been accessed from news agencies, and the censor's keen eye probably missed the lapse. The report explained the Maoist movement: "They have tapped into the rural poor's growing anger at being left out of the country's economic gains and are now present in 20 of the country's 28 states. They have about 10,000 to 20,000 fighters."
Was the Communist Party of China apprehensive that millions of their own citizens similarly left out of their country's economic gains would get ideas from their neighbour's Maoists? Or that some Chinese might even recall their own violent revolution led by Mao, which now seems a distant dream? The violence that accompanies mass protests here is nothing compared to India's Maoist violence; the desperation of many who have been wronged by the powerful leads them to burn themselves or jump off bridges.
Last year, in a span of two months, 12 persons threatened to jump off a bridge in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province in the south. The 13th was pushed off by an irritated onlooker. The bridge had become the favoured spot for protesters as its location ensured instant visibility. The police would try to get the protesters down first by pleading, then by using rescue vessels with air cushions to ensure a safe jump. All this would hold up traffic for hours.
In public interest
Guangzhou's main streets are anyway a nightmare of noisy traffic jams. The reasons for which the would-be jumpers used this dangerous method to attract attention ranged from unpaid wages to injuries at the workplace that had gone uncompensated. The 13th was a young man who claimed to have lost 2 million yuan in a failed construction project.
An old man first approached the police offering to mediate with the jumper. Refused permission, he broke through the cordon and climbed up to where the man was. The next few moments were caught live on TV: the old man sat close behind the would-be jumper, talked to him, but was ignored, and then he put his hand forward in a handshake. As the jumper gave him his hand, the old man yanked him off the bridge.
What happened next was even more shocking: the old man turned to the shocked crowd below with a smile and a salute. The TV showed one of the policemen returning his salute, even as he and other cops dragged the man to a waiting ambulance. He had fallen on an air-cushion, but the 26-foot fall resulted in spine and elbow injuries.
"I pushed him off because (these) jumpers are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest," said the old man. "They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."
Just how serious the appeals are can be gauged from the fact that it took four more months of such protests for the authorities to come up with a solution: greasing the bridge's railings so that no one could climb up.
